2 NATO Soldiers and Interpreter Killed

Two soldiers of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and their interpreter were killed Saturday morning in southern Afghanistan when their vehicle was caught in an improvised explosive devices explosion, said an ISAF statement.
A further three soldiers were also injured in the same incident who are currently undergoing treatment at an ISAF medical facility, the statement added.
In accordance with ISAF policy, ISAF does not release the casualty's nationality prior to the relevant national authority doing so.
Some 55,000 foreign troops are being deployed in the war-torn Afghanistan for keeping security and fighting terrorism.

Bless all our NATO soldiers and and their families.

UPDATED (11 am):
Two Canadian Soldiers Killed:

Cpl. Nicolas Raymond Beauchamp of the 5th Field Ambulance in Valcartier

(28 yrs of age)

To view or sign the guestbook for the family of Cpl Beauchamp,

click here :

and

Pte. Michel Levesque of the Royal 22nd (25 yrs old)

To view or sign the guestbook for the family of Pte Levesque,

click here:

Their Afghan interpreter were killed and three other soldiers were wounded in a roadside bomb attack in Kandahar province early today. The soldiers were traveling in a Light Armoured Vehicle (LAV) when it struck a landmine on a road near Bazar-e Panjwaii, west of Kandahar City. The three soldiers wounded in the attack were transported to hospital at Kandahar Air Field. Their injuries are not considered life-threatening, a Canadian Forces official said. “ISAF troops contend with the threat of (bomb) strikes on a daily basis, but our soldiers continue to improve the security situation and make a very real and positive difference to the lives of normal hardworking Afghan people,” said Wing Commander Antony McCord, a spokesman for Regional Command South. “Our thoughts at this time are with the families and friends of those who have been killed or injured in today’s incident,” he said in the ISAF statement. Today, a series of clashes in southern Afghanistan left 33 suspected Taliban militants dead, while a suicide bomber in the east wounded a NATO soldier, officials said. At least four police officers also died in the fighting. Twenty-three Taliban militants were killed during a U.S.-led coalition operation aimed at disrupting a weapons transfer in southern Afghanistan, the coalition said today. A truck apparently full of Taliban weapons exploded during the operation in Helmand province’s Garmsir district. The coalition said it didn’t known what triggered the explosion. Coalition troops detained 11 people suspected of being part of a weapons running operation. Elsewhere in Kandahar province, Canadian and Afghan troops battled militants in the Zhari district today, leaving at least 10 suspected militants dead, according to provincial police chief Sayed Agha Saqeb. Authorities recovered the bodies of four of the dead militants alongside their weapons and ammunition, Saqeb said. There were no casualties among the Canadian and Afghan troops. In a separate attack yesterday, one Afghan civilian was killed and two others injured when a suicide bomber on a motorbike ignited against a passing ISAF convoy in the Chaparhar district of Nangarhar province. The ISAF vehicle was badly damaged but only one ISAF service member sustained minor injuries. “Once again we have an incident in which Afghan civilians end up suffering from Taliban extremists using indiscriminate weapons,” said Brig.-Gen. Carlos Branco, an ISAF spokesman. “Eighty per cent of the victims of Taliban suicide bombings are civilians."

Statement by the Minister of National Defence on the Deaths of Two Canadian Soldiers in Afghanistan
The Honourable Peter Gordon MacKay, Minister of National Defence and Minister of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, issued the following statement today on the death of two Canadian soldiers and one Afghan interpreter and the wounding of three soldiers:"I am deeply saddened by the loss of Corporal Nicolas Raymond Beauchamp and Private Michel Jr. Levesque, who died yesterday in Afghanistan. I would like to extend my condolences to their families and friends during this very difficult time. I also wish a quick recovery for the other Canadian soldiers injured in this incident.My sympathies also go out to the family and friends of an Afghan interpreter who lost his life in this incident. This courageous Afghan national gave his life in support of the mission to help Afghanistan achieve peace, stability and the hope for a better future.These soldiers were participating in a joint operation to further stabilize the Panjwayi district, west of Kandahar City. These soldiers were in Afghanistan to help bring back hope to a population that has seen much hardship and turmoil.Canada is in Afghanistan at the request of the democratically elected government, and as part of a UN-sanctioned mission to help build a stable, democratic, and self-sufficient society. Rebuilding schools, hospitals, and roads as well as training Afghan security forces cannot occur in an unstable environment. Our Canadian Forces members are playing a key role in this NATO-led mission, helping improve the security situation in order to create the conditions necessary for Afghans to live normal lives.We will remain forever grateful for the sacrifice of these brave soldiers, and we are all saddened by the loss of these exceptional Canadians."

Message from Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaelle Jean, Governor General of Canada:
My husband, Jean-Daniel Lafond, and I were deeply saddened to learn of the recent deaths of two soldiers Corporal Nicolas Raymond Beauchamp, 5e Ambulance de campagne, and Private Michel Jr. Levesque, 3e Bataillon, Royal 22e Regiment, both based out of Valcartier, Quebec, as well as the death of an Afghan interpreter, west of Kandahar, in Afghanistan.Our thoughts are with their families, friends and loved ones, whose anguish, suffering and distress are unimaginable. We also extend our wishes for courage and a prompt recovery to those injured in this tragedy.These soldiers and their comrades went to Afghanistan with confidence in the importance of their mission: to rebuild this war-torn country, and to restore and maintain peace for its people. They offered up the very best of themselves, right to the end. We will never forget them.Michaelle Jean
Corporal Nicolas Raymond Beauchamp was member of 5e Ambulance de campagne and Private Michel Jr Levesque was members of 3e Bataillon of Royal 22e Regiment, based out of Valcartier Quebec.
Statement by the Honourable Stéphane Dion, Leader of the Opposition:
I was deeply saddened to learn of the loss of Corporal Nicolas Raymond Beauchamp of the 5th Field Ambulance in Valcartier and Private Michel Lévesque of Quebec’s Royal 22nd Regiment, killed in Afghanistan this morning. This immense tragedy drives home the very real perils that members of the Canadian Forces face every day, as they risk their lives to create a safer and more secure world for the people of Afghanistan. Members of the Liberal Party of Canada and our Parliamentary Caucus join me in expressing our most heartfelt condolences to the family, friends and comrades of these brave Canadians as they cope with this tremendous loss. Our thoughts and prayers also go out to the family and friends of the Afghan interpreter who also died in the attack, as well as the three other soldiers who were wounded.

NATO's Military Committee to Arrive in Ottawa

NATO's Military Committee arrives in Ottawa Thursday for a four-day visit, September 06-September 09 to Canada. After an overnight stop in Ottawa, the committee will fly to Victoria, B.C., on Friday for a series of meetings and interactive seminars.General Rick Hillier, Canada's Chief of the Defence Staff, will welcome the Chairman of the Military Committee, General Ray Henault, and NATO's 25 other chiefs of defence upon their arrival in Ottawa on 06 September where they will attend a State Dinner with the Governor General, before flying on to Victoria, British Columbia for a series of meetings and interactive seminars.These meetings will focus on how to improve providing resources and other capabilities to enhance operations.

Date: Thursday, Sept. 6th 2007
Time: 12 - 1:20 p.m.
Location: Ottawa (personally, and for security purposes, I'm going to refrain from submitting the location on this site)

A 50-person honour guard will be inspected by the Chairman. The Canadian Forces Central
Band will perform and there will be a CF Snowbird fly pass.

The annual meeting of the alliance’s military committee has been in the planning stages for the last two years and NATO officials stress it is not an emergency session to deal with the ongoing Afghanistan mission. While Afghanistan will be discussed, it will be in the context of longer-term planning, they said.
NATO’s military committee is the senior military authority in NATO, providing the alliance’s civilian decision-makers with advice on defence matters. The committee is currently chaired by Canadian Gen. Ray Henault.
Henault proposed the main focus of the meeting be “delivering coherent capabilities on future operations,” said a NATO official.
The discussions will concentrate on the level of resources available to the alliance, training and mounting military operations.
“It is our view that by taking a longer-term approach to planning for operations we stand a better chance of having the right capabilities, from more allies, at the right time,” said the NATO official.
Over the last year, some NATO nations have been at odds with each other over the level of involvement in combat by alliance members in Afghanistan. Some nations do not undertake night operations while others operate under caveats which prevent an active combat role.

About the Military Committee- What is it? :

The Military Committee (MC) is the senior military authority in NATO, providing NATO’s civilian decision-making bodies – the North Atlantic Council, the Defence Planning Committee and the Nuclear Planning Group - with advice on military matters.

The Military Committee is made up of senior military officers from the NATO member countries who serve as their country’s Military Representatives to NATO, representing their Chief of Defence.
The Military Representatives work in a national capacity, representing the interests of their countries while remaining open to negotiation and discussion so that a NATO consensus can be reached.

The Committee’s principal role is to provide direction and advice on military policy and strategy. It is responsible for recommending to NATO's political authorities those measures considered necessary for the common defence of the NATO area and for the implementation of decisions regarding NATO’s operations and missions.

ISAF'S Reconstruction

Credit: NATO Click on map to enlarge.

Are the Taliban Hiding Behind Afghan Villagers?

NATO blames Taliban fighters for civilian deaths in air strike
June 23-07

Afghan villager cries in despair as he holds a piece of grass bread

in Afghanistan. Besieged by the Taliban and crushed by years of

crop-devastating drought,the people in the region are dying.

-

NATO accused Taliban fighters yesterday of provoking an air strike that reportedly killed 25 innocents, including three infants and nine women, while a Dutch general charged that insurgents executed villagers during another battle.
The allegations come amid a new surge of criticism over civilian deaths during attacks by foreign forces, a debate that underlines how the five-year-old war against insurgents is also a struggle for hearts and minds among long-suffering Afghans and voters in NATO countries.
President Hamid Karzai and others have long complained that civilian losses in NATO or U.S.-led operations are undermining the effort to stabilize Afghanistan and prevent a Taliban comeback. The deaths are "difficult for us to accept or understand,'' Karzai said Thursday.
NATO commanders are adamant that the militants -- not foreign forces -- deserve most of the blame for the toll among civilians.
An alliance statement said NATO aircraft struck after Taliban fighters attacked troops from NATO's International Security Assistance Force about 15 kilometres northeast of the town of Gereshk.
"A compound was assessed to have been occupied by up to 30 insurgent fighters, most of whom were killed in the engagement,'' the statement said.
Lt.-Col. Mike Smith, a NATO spokesperson, expressed concern about Afghan police reports that civilians also died in the air strike. But he said insurgents chose the time and place for their attack, so "the risk to civilians was probably deliberate.''
"It is this irresponsible action that may have led to casualties,'' he said.
The air strike killed 20 militants, but it also wiped out two civilian families totalling 25 people, including nine women, three babies and a mullah, provincial police Chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal told Associated Press.
"NATO was targeting the areas where the (insurgent) fire was coming from . . . and two compounds were completely destroyed, and the families living in those compounds were killed,'' he said.
Military commanders said their forces have to be free to respond to attacks.
"If someone is firing at our troops they have the right to defend themselves and have the right to fire at a position which is firing at them,'' said another NATO spokesperson, Maj. John Thomas. "If the enemy has put themselves in an area where they are firing from among civilians, this is when we sometimes have casualties.''
Thomas said NATO forces try to monitor a target from the air and ground for any civilians. "But in the cases like (Gereshk), when we respond to an ambush or an enemy attack, things move a little bit more quickly,'' he said.

Seven NATO Soldiers Died in Helicopter Crash

As I awoke this morning to this news - I was truly saddened. (Please note there are currently unconfirmed reports of nationalities of the soldiers.)

I know what many family members are going through.. "the wait" ... while the heart races and .. yes the tears come easily.
Let's pray for and take those soldiers' families and friends and take them into our hearts today no matter which country they are from.... as they are all our family.. our military family.

Chinook Helicopter

Seven NATO soldiers died when their Chinook helicopter crashed on Wednesday in southern Afghanistan, the site of some of the heaviest recent fighting between Western forces and the Taliban.
Troops responding to the scene of the crash were ambushed and called for an air strike to eliminate the threat, NATO officials said.
NATO would not say immediately if the big, twin-rotor military helicopter was directly involved in a battle with Taliban guerrillas or whether it was shot down. The cause of the crash was under investigation.

"Clearly there were enemy fighters in the area," said Major John Thomas, a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Kabul. "It's not impossible for small arms fire to bring down a helicopter."
The helicopter went down in the southern province of Helmand, Afghanistan's main opium poppy-growing region, where Western forces have clashed repeatedly with Taliban militants in recent months following a winter lull in fighting.
"The entire crew of five died in the incident. There were also two military passengers who died," ISAF said in a statement. "One Afghan civilian was injured by small arms fire after the crash."

ISAF did not release the nationalities of soldiers killed or wounded in Afghanistan.

And Now the Taliban Plant the Mines...

An 11 year old boy recounts how his leg was blown off above the knee.

Photo Credit: AP

Land Mine Accidents Drop in Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan- At a lecture on dangers of land mines, the schoolchildren listened in horror as a guest speaker recounted how his left leg was blown off above the knee. It was three years ago, 11-year-old Massoud said, and he had been playing with a kite near his home.
"When I arrived over the top of the hill, suddenly a bomb exploded," the sweet-faced boy said. "No one would come near me because they were afraid another mine would explode. Then I crawled out of the mined area."
After a quarter century of war, Afghanistan is still littered with millions of land mines and other unexploded ordnance, and more mines are being planted in regions of the south where a Taliban-led guerrilla war against NATO forces has been escalating.
Yet as Afghanistan marks International Mine Awareness Day Wednesday, there is some cause for optimism. Accident rates have declined dramatically, thanks to the imaginative and culturally sensitive efforts of organizations such as OMAR—a mine-clearing NGO that recruited Massoud for the recent lesson in a Kabul mosque.
His audience, a classroom full of boys about his age, listened, their mouths agape. Their wide eyes moved from his face to the artificial leg under his gray tunic.
Massoud, who like many Afghans uses only one name, is one of nearly 800 people maimed and killed by the debris of war in Afghanistan every year. That's less than half the number five
years ago, when the country was embarking on reconstruction after the fall of the Taliban, the Islamic movement routed by the U.S. and its Afghan allies for hosting Osama bin Laden.
While nothing conveys the danger of land mines quite like a personal account, Massoud's macabre show-and-tell was just one small moment in a campaign that owes much of its success to its sensitivity to conservative Islam.
The U.N. has been demining Afghanistan since 1989, spending an estimated $300 million. It now believes it has cleared more than 60 percent of land sown with mines since the Soviet invasion in 1979. But as many as 4.2 million Afghans still live in suspected mined areas, according to U.N. statistics.
To teach the dangers, educators must tiptoe through a dizzying list of no-no's in a society hypersensitive about portraying even modestly dressed women and girls. In some conservative parts of the country, just photos of human forms and video, which were forbidden by the Taliban during their repressive rule, are also frowned upon.
"Some people object to seeing girls in any of our materials. They don't object to boys, but they do object to girls," said Susan Helseth, an adviser for the U.N. Mine Action Center for Afghanistan who oversees the development of education materials.
The Association for Aid and Relief, Japan (AAR-Japan) had to redo a mine awareness booklet whose cover showed a girl and boy sitting together in a class. An Afghan review committee said children of that age should be segregated by sex, so it was reprinted with boys and girls on separate pages.
AAR-Japan also uses two mobile cinemas run on generators to show villagers an 8-minute mine awareness video called "The Way to Home"—but not in the south, where conservative Muslims reject the idea of screening movies, said the group's director Koji Miyazaki.
He said there is also concern that the actress in the film, Marina Golbahari, may cause anger in former Taliban strongholds because of her role in the award-winning 2003 movie "Osama." The movie portrayed some Taliban as misogynistic pedophiles.
The communications firm Sayara, which works with the aid organization Handicap International, uses mobile theater to get its message across, although without any female characters.
The firm's director Antoine Heudre said it was a good way to reach illiterate people, particularly in villages that lack electricity to run televisions. Some 86 percent of women and 56 percent of men in Afghanistan cannot read.
Despite the many cultural and educational challenges, the mine awareness message, combined with the efforts of deminers, appears to be working. According to the international Red Cross, there were 771 victims of mine and ordnance accidents in 2006—down from 1,717 victims in 2002.
In all, mines and unexploded ordnance have killed at least 942 people and injured 4,543 in the past five years. Most of the victims are male.
Over the years, simple color-coded messages have been painted on rocks, houses and mountains around the country by deminers: red for danger, white for a cleared area. Also, mine risk educators use painted diagrams to warn children about land mines, cluster bombs and other explosives.
Despite such powerful education efforts, continued land mine accidents appear inevitable. Nearly 90 percent of accidents happen in unmarked areas, and it would take decades to clear Afghanistan entirely—and that is without factoring in the leftovers of ongoing violence.
Mullah Mahmood, a Taliban commander in the southern province of Helmand, told The Associated Press that militants have planted new land mines as part of their armed campaign against heavily armed NATO forces.

600 Afghans Rescued by NATO-Led Troops

NATO evacuates 600 in Afghanistan floods
KABUL: NATO-led troops used helicopters to evacuate some 600 stranded villagers in southern Afghanistan after their homes were destroyed by widespread flooding, the alliance says.
Despite poor weather and persistent rainfall, Dutch and American helicopters managed to land and rescue people in the border regions between the southern provinces of Helmand and Uruzgan, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said in a statement."In some cases, ISAF had to persuade frightened people to accept being hoisted out of danger," the statement said.
The rescue operation happened at the time when NATO is conducting its largest ever offensive in southern Afghanistan, aimed at winning over a population long supportive of militant fighters.
The UN mission to Afghanistan together with the government have prepared food, tents, tarpaulins and blankets for an estimated 400 affected families, said Aleem Siddique, a UN spokesman.
Heavy rains triggered floods in Afghanistan's south and east, destroying homes and fields and killing several people, officials said.