George Wallace
Army.ca Dinosaur
- Reaction score
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- 710
The incongruous said:In Tomahawk's video at 1:46 one of the french soldiers puts something on his rifle (a grenade perhaps?)
any ideas?
A "Rifle Grenade".
The incongruous said:In Tomahawk's video at 1:46 one of the french soldiers puts something on his rifle (a grenade perhaps?)
any ideas?
A rifle grenade. We had rifle grenades thru to the phasing out of the FN C1.The incongruous said:In Tomahawk's video at 1:46 one of the french soldiers puts something on his rifle (a grenade perhaps?)
any ideas?
But even as France mourns its dead, there were questions about the preparedness of the troops as well as the military response on the ground.
Responding to criticism that the soldiers were too young and inexperienced, French Defence Minister Herve Morin said a professional army is “inevitably” composed of young soldiers.
There has been a growing debate about what actually happened.
An unnamed soldier interviewed in the French paper, Le Monde, said they only had assault rifles and that they ran out of ammunition during the attack.
French media reports also raised the issue of delayed air support. According to the daily, the French troops were under enemy fire “for nearly four hours without reinforcements”.
“When we reached 50 meters from a ridgeline, the firing started. It didn’t stop for six hours. The attackers had elite shooters. They outnumbered us and were waiting for us,” the soldier told the newspaper.
According to the official statement from the French Defense Ministry, nine soldiers were killed within minutes of the firefight starting, and the tenth was killed when his vehicle overturned.
French defense officials are investigating the incident, according to Gen. Elrick Irastorza, Army chief of staff. “Every time we have an incident like this, we have post-experience procedures,” Irastorza told reporters. “We examine what happened and what could have happened.”
Lone Wolf Quagmire said:Beautiful ceremony by the looks of the photo's, unfortunately it had to happen at all.
Overconfidence was probably a factor in the incident that led to the deaths of 10 French soldiers in an ambush in Afghanistan, the French commander in the region was quoted as saying on Monday.
“In the past two weeks we had largely secured the zone but you have to be frank, we were guilty of overconfidence,” General Michel Stollsteiner told the daily newspaper Le Parisien.
“We were surprised instead of surprising our adversary,” said Gen. Stollsteiner, commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force in the Kabul region since Aug. 5.
Ten soldiers were killed and 21 wounded in the ambush in a rugged mountain region some 60 kilometres from the capital Kabul, the worst French military loss in 25 years and the heaviest allied combat loss in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion.
French commanders have said they will go through what happened in the ambush to try to draw lessons for the future and President Nicolas Sarkozy has promised the families of the dead soldiers they would be kept fully informed...
Defence Minister Herve Morin and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner will appear before a parliamentary committee on Tuesday to answer questions and the National Assembly will vote at the end of September on whether to keep French troops in the region.
Mr. Kouchner said the military effort alone would not succeed in bringing stability to the region.
“I am sure ... that the military strategy, which has been indispensable initially, will not be enough,” he told France Inter radio.
“We need what is called ‘Afghanization', that's to say to pass responsibilities, all responsibilities, as quickly as possible to the Afghans.”
“We were surprised instead of surprising our adversary,”
We need what is called ‘Afghanization', that's to say to pass responsibilities, all responsibilities, as quickly as possible to the Afghans
The deaths of nine French soldiers in a Taliban ambush east of Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, on August 18th (the 10th died when his armoured vehicle crashed) is turning into one of the major defense issues in France in recent times. Shock waves continue to resound as rumors are confirmed that four of the nine who died as they lay injured were assassinated by the insurgents and two of the others died of their injuries before help could come.
Rumors that all was not quite as the French defense ministry had described began circling almost as soon as the injured soldiers returned from Afghanistan on August 20th and analyses and articles have appeared daily in the French media from international relations specialists and defense analysts of all kinds, including retired generals.W
hile Afghanistan has not been on most people's radar screens in the past months, questions are now raining down: what is France doing there? Is there an overall policy in Afghanistan? Should the military not be trying to infiltrate the insurgents rather than using noisy vehicles that warn them a mile away of their presence? Why are we not making use of past experience in Algeria? And so on...
Yesterday (September 4) morning, French defense minister Hervé Morin, who was taking part in an open forum on national French radio, was asked directly by a listener how the soldiers had died. Morin refused to answer saying he would not do so “at the specific request of the families of the soldiers involved.”
In a long article in today's quality daily Le Monde, journalist Jacques Follorou quotes the unease amongst the military over the gendarmerie (militarised police)-led investigation which followed the incident. “We had just lost our mates and then the gendarmes came to see us, just like cops, and asked us for justifications, why we'd done this and not that, they questioned us several times and it was taken badly,” says an officer. He adds that “they wanted to know if the commander had not let the section move too far away from its support base given the lack of intelligence and the absence of air cover.”
Le Monde says it was able to see “certain elements” of the investigation “which tend to corroborate the version given by those injured” as opposed to the official version of the events. The 8th RPIMa parachute regiment was fired on uninterruptedly for five and a half to six hours before coalition reinforcements came: one of the first to die was the radio operator. The soldiers, caught in the crossfire, hid behind rocks.
“Those who died,” one of the injured says, “were those who left their rock before nightfall.” The report evokes the “overlap” of the insurgents and the French troops. As Follorou writes “behind this modest term are hidden acts which haunt every soldier. According to elements transmitted by Predator UAVs, the insurgents came down from the mountain crest and came into contact with the injured French soldiers. Four of them died, according to two military sources, their throats slit [emphasis added].”
The French public has suddenly realised that its military are involved in a war, not just a peace-keeping operation.
Yes, there is indecency in a certain voyeurism, seeking details more or less sordid for the benefit of people settled far from the fighting. It is disgusting. Yes, there is indecency by failing to write that these people are murderers....