Quetta:FC arrests Shahzain Bugti

Quetta trendpk.com: Frontier Constabulary (FC) personnel managed to arrest Shahzain Bugti, who was earlier detained at Baleli checkpost, Quetta after a huge quantity of arms and ammunitions were recovered from one of his convoy’s car.

Reportedly, Shahzain refused to come out of his tainted-glass four-wheeler and tried to escape. However, FC men intercepted his vehicle and arrested him after breaking his vehicles window glass.Bugti’s 35 men have also been arrested. Earlier, Provincial President Jamhoori Watan Party (JWP) Shah Zain Bugti was detained along with his 17 men by FC personnel after they recovered a huge cache of arms and ammunition from his motorcade at Baleli Check point in Quetta.

Shahzain, called some TV channels and told them that the recovered arms are not mine, I am being implicated. He alleged that FC wanted to arrest him to stop the announced Dera Bugti long march.Shahzain was returning to Quetta from Chaman.

The seized arms include unlicensed 43 kalashnikovs, 6 RPG, 2 rocket launchers, 70,000 rounds, 2 RR Guns and several IEDs.

Shahzain Bugti is the grandson of slain Baloch leader and former chief minister of Balochistan Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti.

Also, the FC men commandeered Bugtis 11 cars.

Two suicide bombers killed, one captured in Kabul

KABUL: Two suicide bombers were killed Wednesday and another captured alive after they fired a rocket at a tent where hundreds of Afghan delegates were meeting to discuss peace, an official said.

“Three suicide bombers wearing burqas entered a house which was under construction. They fired one RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) towards the tent,” Ghulam Farooq Wardak told delegates to the assembly taking place in Kabul.

“Thank God, two of them were killed, paying for their crimes. The third has been captured,” Wardak, organiser of the “peace jirga,” said.

WH calls graphic Iraq shooting video ”tragic”

WASHINGTON: The White House has described leaked and graphic video of a US helicopter strike in Baghdad three years ago, which killed two Reuters employees and others as “tragic.”

But President Barack Obama”s spokesman Robert Gibbs stressed after the previously classified video was released by whistleblower website WikiLeaks that US forces in war zones take pains to avoid civilian casualties.

The gun camera footage, posted online, includes audio conversations between Apache pilots and controllers in which they identify the men in a Baghdad street as armed insurgents and ask for permission to open fire.

I do not know whether the president has seen the video that was released on the internet. Obviously, it is very graphic in nature and it”s extremely tragic,” Gibbs said.
“Our military will take every precaution necessary to ensure the safety and security of civilians, and particularly those that report in those dangerous places on behalf of news organisations.”

Gibbs referred all questions about investigations into the July 2007 incident to the Pentagon.

WikiLeaks said that it had obtained the video “from a number of military whistleblowers” and decrypted it.

The footage shows an aerial view of a number of men on a Baghdad street including two later identified as Reuters employees Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh.

At least two individuals in the video appear to be carrying weapons but most are unarmed.

The Apache pilots also appear to mistake a camera carried by one of the Reuters employees as a rocket-propelled grenade launcher or RPG.

At one point, the Apache pilots tell controllers they have spotted “five to six individuals with AK-47s” and ask for permission to “engage.”

The Apache pilots open fire with the helicopter”s cannon after which one says there are a “bunch of bodies lying there.”

“Look at those dead bastards,” one says. Another replies, “Nice.”

Shortly after the initial shooting, a van pulls up to pick up the dead and wounded and is fired upon by the Apaches.

Two children in the van were injured and evacuated by US ground troops who arrived later on the scene.

A US military official did not dispute the authenticity of the video but said it “doesn”t give new information, it just gives footage.”

“We had insurgents and reporters in an area where U.S. forces were about to be ambushed,” the official added.

“At the time we weren”t able to discern whether (the Reuters employees) were carrying cameras or weapons.”

Proofs of Indian involvement should be revealed: Nawaz Sharif

Lahore, Pakistan News :- PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif said that the government should bring out solid proofs of Indian involvement in terrorist activities inside Pakistan. He urged to make the Parliament stronger to affectively deal with the law and order situation prevailing in the country.

Talking to media in Sheikg Zayed Hospital Lahore after visiting the injured in the yesterday’s twin blasts in Moon Market, Iqbal Town, he said that the country is passing through a difficult phase and the nation should not be demoralized and they have to be united against the terrorists. He said that he has been listening about India’s intrusion into Pakistan. PML-N leader said that innocent people are being killed. He insisted that the government should formulate comprehensive strategy against terrorism and the matter should be discussed in the Parliament.

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Proofs of Indian involvement should be revealed: Nawaz Sharif was first posted on December 10, 2009 at 7:51 am.

589 militants killed in operation Rah e Nijat

Islamabad, Pakistan News :- A total of 589 terrorists have been killed while 79 security forces personnel have been martyred in operation Rah-e-Nijaat so far. According to ISPR, a huge cache of arms and ammunition have been recovered from different hideouts of fleeing terrorists, since start of Operation Rah-e-Nijaat on October 16.

It included 49 anti aircraft machine guns of 12.7 mm caliber, 15 Machine guns of 14.5 mm caliber, 38 RPG 7, 16 heavy machine guns, 592 rifles all types, 45 small machine guns, three artillery guns of various types, one Russian made missile launcher, 32 Pistols, five recoils rifles along with these truck load of ammunition, 203886 bullets of 12.7 mm anti aircraft machine gun, 9000 rounds of 14.5 mm machine gun, 830 rockets of RPG 7, 11 Russian made missiles, 106 rockets of recoiles rifles and 140 Rockets of SPG 9.

Providing details of the last 24 hours of Operation Rah-e-Nijaat in South Waziristan, the ISPR said that a number of IEDs were recovered and destroyed during sanitization of Aka Khel Pungai near Ahmedwam and Abdullah Noor Kaskai near Kotkai at Jandola sector.
Meanwhile, at Shakai sector, the security forces apprehended 5 suspects at Miachan Baba and Shaka. Similarly, at Razmak Sector, the forces cleared 25 compounds at Tara Tiza Alghad and Mairobi Raghzai, where huge cache of arms and ammunition were recovered. The terrorists fired 1 rocket at Razmak Camp which was effectively responded, however, no loss reported, informed the ISPR. Security forces have also cleared Ghujre, two kilometer north of Pash Ziarat, where tunnels and underground living bunkers were discovered and destroyed.

Meanwhile, during Operation Rah-e-Rast in Swat Malakand, two terrorists voluntarily surrendered themselves at Salhand and Chamtalai post. And security forces apprehended 10 suspects at Saidu Sharif, Fizaghat, Bishbanr, Mingora and Jijal Kandao near Fatehpur.

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589 militants killed in operation Rah e Nijat was first posted on December 10, 2009 at 7:54 am.

12 terrorists killed during last 24 hours: ISPR

Islamabad, Pakistan:- In last 24 hours, 12 terrorists have reportedly been killed during operation Rah e Nijat, being undertaken by security forces in South Waziristan Agency. During the operation, four soldiers embraced martyrdom and three others were injured, an ISPR media release said on Tuesday.

In Jandola Sararogha Axis security forces are consolidating their positions and extending perimeter of security around Kaskai and Shisanwam. Terrorists from surrounding heights are engaging security forces with rockets and small arms. Fire fight is continuing. As a result, four soldiers embraced Shahadat and three others were injured. Security forces recovered 21 mortar bombs, 22 grenades during clearance operation at Spinkai and Nazarkhel while one RPG -7 and material used for preparation of suicide jackets were also recovered during clearance operation at Tarakai Ridge.
Security forces recovered 1 x 12.7 heavy machine gun along with 100 rounds during clearance operation at Sagarzai while 1 x 14.5 heavy machine gun along with 500 rounds were also recovered during clearance operation at Spin Ghara. Security forces destroyed three vehicles used by terrorists and recovered 2 x 12.7 with 38 rounds, 1 x 75 mm RR, 10 x 107 mm SBRL rockets, 27 x 82 mm mortar bombs, 100 rifle rounds at Kund. During the process 12 terrorists were killed. Security forces recovered four RPG – seven rockets, 4 x 107 mm SBRL rockets, 900 machine gun rounds and 11 IEDs at Kalkalle village.

In Shakai – Ladha Axis, security forces are consolidating their positions at Sherwangi and perimeter of security is being extended. The important heights surrounding Sherwangi have been secured and terrorists have vacated their positions leaving behind arms and ammunition.

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12 terrorists killed during last 24 hours: ISPR was first posted on October 20, 2009 at 10:35 pm.

AP Impact – Afghan – Death of a Marin

AP Impact – Afghan – Death of a Marin, Afghanistan — The pomegranate grove looked ominous.

The U.S. patrol had a tip that Taliban fighters were lying in ambush, and a Marine had his weapon trained on the trees 70 yards away. “If you see anything move from there, light it up,” Cpl. Braxton Russell told him.

Thirty seconds later, a salvo of gunfire and RPGs — rocket-propelled grenades — poured out of the grove. “Casualty! We’ve got a casualty!” someone shouted. A grenade had hit Lance Cpl. Joshua “Bernie” Bernard in the legs.

A Marine and son of a Marine, a devout Christian, Iraq war veteran and avid hiker, home-schooled in rural Maine, Bernard was about to become the next fatality in the deadliest month of the deadliest year since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The troops of Golf Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines had been fighting for three days to wrest this town in southern Afghanistan from the Taliban who had ruled it for four years. As dusk approached on Friday, Aug. 14, things had quieted down. The Taliban seemed to have gone. Another day had passed in the long, hard slog for U.S. troops serving on the parched plains and mountains of Afghanistan, in a war that has steadily intensified.

Then, as the Marines were enjoying some downtime, reports of mortar, machine-gun and sniper fire sent them scrambling again. The 11 Americans and 10 Afghan soldiers edged their way into the town’s abandoned bazaar. With them were Associated Press correspondent Alfred de Montesquiou, AP photographer Julie Jacobson and AP Television News cameraman Ken Teh.

Eyes scanning rooftops for gunmen and the ground for buried bombs, the patrol pushed past shops still smoldering from U.S. mortar shells, past Taliban posters on the walls exhorting the populace to fight the Americans. Bernard, his face daubed in gray and brown camouflage paint, was the point man.

A young Afghan in front of the family store showed the patrol a patch of upturned earth in a ditch. It was here that insurgents had fired their mortars a few minutes earlier.

“But don’t say I told you, or they’ll kill me,” the man said.

As he spoke, the Marines got word of the ambush being readied nearby. Two Cobra helicopters circling overhead fired Hellfire missiles at a mortar position. The Marines weren’t sure this had settled the matter with the Taliban. They pushed on.

Then they reached the pomegranate grove.

At first Jake Godby thought Bernard had stepped on an explosive device. Godby, a 24-year-old 2nd lieutenant from Fredericksburg, Va., quickly regrouped his men and directed the returning fire.

The squad found itself stuck under sustained and heavy fire with a wounded man on a narrow crossroad — buildings behind them, insurgents hidden in the orchard in front of them, and a large puddle from a broken water pump in the middle. Godby had the troops advance to the cover of a mud wall and an irrigation ditch. The orange streaks of bullets whizzing in every direction grew visible as the light faded.

“That’s when I realized there was a casualty and saw the injured Marine, about 10 yards from where I’d stood,” Jacobson would write in her journal. “For the second time in my life, I watched a Marine lose his. He was hit with the RPG which blew off one of his legs and badly mangled the other. … I hadn’t seen it happen, just heard the explosion. I hit the ground and lay as flat as I could and shot what I could of the scene.”

Bernard lay on the ground, two Marines standing over him exposed, trying to help. A first tourniquet on Bernard’s leg broke. A medic applied another.

“I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” Bernard said. Troops crawling under the bullets dragged him to the MRAP, the mine-resistant armored vehicle that accompanied the patrol.

“The other guys kept telling him ‘Bernard, you’re doing fine, you’re doing fine. You’re gonna make it. Stay with me Bernard!’ He (a Marine) held Bernard’s head in his hands when he seemed to go limp and tried to keep him awake. A couple more ran in with a stretcher,” Jacobson recalled in the journal.

“Another RPG hit the mud wall on the other side of the street from where we were, about 5 yards away. It was a big BOOM, and I just lay my face in the dirt and everything went quiet for about 10 seconds. It was just silence like I was wearing noise-canceling headphones or like world peace had finally descended upon the earth. The air was white with sand. Then I started feeling the rubble fall down around me. And I thought, ‘Is this what it’s like to be shell shocked? Am I all still here? I can’t believe I am.’

“I was fine and surprised at how calm I was and that I could actually still hear.”

The rocket-propelled grenade exploded in a powerful pinkish blast, lighting up the scene and briefly knocking out de Montesquiou and Staff Sgt. Alexander Ferguson. When Ferguson recovered, he helped haul Bernard inside the vehicle. Bernard was driven back to base some 500 yards from there, receiving first aid along the way. Minutes later, a helicopter evacuated him to Camp Leatherneck, the main Marine compound in southern Afghanistan. His vital signs were stable when he left.

At the ambush site, the fighting continued uninterrupted for 10 to 15 minutes. The men could see the grenades coming in at them, and even some of the machine gunners. They estimated they were facing six to eight fighters.

Adding to the confusion, an Afghan soldier with the troops fired his own grenade at the insurgents, but he hadn’t checked whether anybody was close by. A Marine was knocked out by the back-blast.

Another grabbed the Afghan by the collar. “Once he stopped shooting, we were able to get control of the situation,” Russell said.

Some Marines are uneasy patrolling with the Afghan National Army. For one thing, there’s a language barrier. During the shootout at the orchard, the patrol’s Afghan interpreter disappeared and took cover, leaving the Marines unable to coordinate their moves with the Afghan soldiers.

“They’re not lacking courage, they’re just lacking training right now,” said Russell, 22, from Stafford, Va. “At least they were shooting in the right direction.”

The fighting ebbed with nightfall. Godby and some of the Marines equipped with night vision glasses pushed deeper into the orchard, but the insurgents were gone. Intelligence pointed to three enemy dead, several Marines said, but it could not be confirmed.

That night, officers assembled the platoon in a darkened room of the run-down house where the Marines had camped after taking Dahaneh two days earlier. There the officers delivered the news: Bernard had died of a blood clot in his heart on the operating table. He was Golf Company’s third fatality since arriving in Afghanistan in May.

Bernard was the 19th American to die in Afghanistan in August. Fifty-one Marines, soldiers and seamen lost their lives that month. Of the 739 Americans killed in and around Afghanistan since 2001, 151 died last year and 180 so far this year.

Down a rural dirt road in New Portland, western Maine, John and Sharon Bernard sat on their porch and talked about their son.

Joshua, they said, loved literature and showed early interest in the Bible and Christianity. “He had a very strong faith right from the beginning,” his mother said.

His father described him as “humble, shy, unassuming — the very first to offer help.” He didn’t smoke or drink, and always opened the door for others. His main friends were his church group, whom he would visit when on leave, and his sister Katy, 20.

Bernard’s father is a retired Marine 1st sergeant. Three weeks before the Aug. 14 ambush that killed his son, he had written to his congressman, Rep. Michael Michaud, expressing frustration at what he described as a change in the Afghanistan rules of engagement to one of “spare the civilians at all cost.” He called this “disgraceful, immoral and fatal” to U.S. forces in combat.

Joshua loved videogames and snowboarding, and hiked parts of the Appalachian Trail with his father. He hoped to become a U.S. marshal.

“Service and personal honor,” is how his father summarized his son.

Three days after Bernard’s death, as his belongings were being packed for shipment to his family, Cpl. Joshua Jackson, his squad leader, was still referring to him in the present tense.

“He definitely doesn’t hesitate,” said Jackson, 23, from Copley, Ohio. “He’s very good, he definitely has the nerves to do what he’s needed to do.”

He called Bernard “a true-heartedly very good guy … probably one of the best guys I’ve known in my entire life.”

The hardest part is “just wondering if there’s something that I could have done different, or maybe prevented him from dying,” Jackson said. “But that’s something we’ve all got to deal with.”

“I think it’s got to do with being a Marine; you just carry on,” said Godby. That night he got two hours of sleep. Before dawn, his platoon took part in a raid on a suspected Taliban stronghold.

Bernard was determined, his comrades said. That’s why he was chosen as the squad’s point man and navigator, moving at the front of his unit.

Lance Cpl. Jason Pignon, 22, from Thayer, Ill., was his close friend. They had been in the same platoon since 2007 when they joined “the Fleet,” as Marines call the units preparing to deploy. They served together near Fallujah in Iraq in 2008, and again in Afghanistan.

During the firefight, Jacobson had wrestled with a question every war photographer faces: whether to offer to help save a life, or keep out of the way of the professionals and go on shooting pictures.

Some of Bernard’s comrades asked to see the photos. In her journal she described them flipping through the images she had captured that day:

“They did stop when they came to that moment. But none of them complained or grew angry about it. They understood that it was what it was. They understand, despite that he was their friend, it was the reality of things.”

It had all gone very quickly. It was late afternoon when the Taliban fired their first RPGs. It was dusk when the Marine was driven away in the armored vehicle. And it was night when the patrol returning to base saw the dark silhouette of the helicopter that flew him away.

Lance Cpl. Joshua “Bernie” Bernard was 21 years old.

Glenn Adams contributed to this report from New Portland, Maine. ( thanks to http://blog.taragana.com for this report)

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AP Impact – Afghan – Death of a Marin was first posted on September 5, 2009 at 12:07 am.
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