Taleban 'snipers' start to find range

Published on Tuesday 29 June 2010 18:30

TALEBAN snipers and small bands of sharpshooters are partly to blame for more than 100 Nato deaths in June, making it by far the deadliest month of the nine-year war.

Although Nato insists it is still too early to confirm a definite change in Taleban tactics, US and British officials revealed more soldiers are dying in "pinpointed" attacks and "small sniping incidents" than ever before.

The monthly toll of allied casualties topped 100 for the first time yesterday, with the announcement in America that a soldier died on 24 June in the western province of Farah.

Four Norwegian soldiers were killed by an explosion in the north west of the country on Sunday, while a British soldier was killed by a single bullet, in Helmand, later the same evening.

The majority of deaths were caused by improvised explosive devices - the Taleban's deadly homemade bombs - in Helmand and Kandahar where the insurgency is fiercest, but an unusually large number of soldiers were killed by "small arms fire".

Of the 20 British fatalities this month, nine of them were shot dead, seven died in explosions and four were killed when their vehicle rolled into a canal.

The Ministry of Defence said most recent British soldier to die, Edinburgh-born Corporal Jamie Kirkpatrick, was killed by a "single round" as he made his way back to a checkpoint in Nahr-e Saraj. "Despite immediate first aid he was sadly killed in action," the statement said.

A spokesman for Nato's International Security Assistance Force said 12 soldiers died of non-combat related injuries in June, which includes accidents and suicides, 81 were killed in action and another eight died of their injuries in hospitals outside Afghanistan, bringing the total to 101.

"There's anecdotal evidence that (the insurgents] have been successful in some areas where we haven't seen success before - in face-to-face incidents, these small sniping incidents" said coalition spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Joseph T Breassale.

He said it was not always "one guy with a long gun shooting from a hide position," which is the military's definition of a sniper, but "small skirmishes" instead. In the past, western forces often derided the insurgents for their "spray and pray" approach to battle, but that carelessness has now gone.

Nato insists the main reason for a surge in friendly deaths is because there are more soldiers - roughly 142,000 - in more places than ever before.

It took 15 months from the start of US-led invasion, in late 2001, for insurgents to claim their first 100 allied scalps and it wasn't until 2005 that more than 100 soldiers were killed in a single year.

Nato officials are loathe to identify successful Taleban tactics for fear of encouraging more of the same. But a senior Nato official confirmed that attacks were "more pinpoint than a few years ago". He said one possible reason for that change is the success of special forces operations designed to kill, capture and disrupt the bomb makers and their masters.

"It's very small units firing, some of it would be snipers," he said. "But I'm not sure Jude Law [In Enemy at the Gates] would necessarily recognise them as such."

Commandant General James Conway, the head of the US Marine Corps, told the US House Armed Services Committee in February: "The biggest threat in Marjah [in Helmand] is not necessarily the IEDs for our killed in action.

"It is the sniper that takes a long-range shot and can penetrate our protective equipment, particularly the helmet."