This is the GOOD NEWS many of us who have been working to help Afghanistan and the Afghan people have been waiting for - The Afghan people fighting the Taliban.
The Afghan people have taken on the Taliban in their own villages.... This is very much like what happened in Anbar Province, Iraq where the people got sick of the terrorists and turned on them.
This is what will be needed if Afghanistan will be free. Awesome to see Afghanis standing up to these cowards who use IEDs and terror to keep the Afghan people from being free to set their own destiny.
Villagers
Take On Taliban in Their Heartland
By
CARLOTTA GALL
NY TIMES
Published:
March 20, 2013
PISHIN
GAN SAYEDAN, Afghanistan — An uprising against the Taliban that began last
month in this southern Afghan village has now spread through dozens of others,
according to residents and Afghan and American officials, in the most
significant popular turning against the Islamist insurgents in recent years.
Since
early February, when villagers joined with police forces to begin ousting
Taliban fighters from this region of rich vineyards and orchards southwest of
Kandahar City, hundreds of residents have rallied to support the government. Nearly
100 village elders vowed at a public meeting Monday to keep the Taliban out as
the new fighting season sets in, and Afghan flags are flying from rooftops in
the villages, residents said.
Isolated
uprisings against the Taliban have been reported in several different parts of
Afghanistan over the past 18 months. But the revolt in Panjwai is considered
significant because it is the first in southern Afghanistan, in the spiritual
heartland of the Taliban movement, where the group’s influence had endured
despite repeated operations by American and NATO forces.
Though
no one is claiming that the Taliban are forever out of the fight even in this
district — the insurgents have vowed a vengeful return and in the past week
killed two men in the area — the Panjwai uprising has given an example of what
can be accomplished when local resentment over bullying by militants is
accompanied by reliable government support.
It
has been good news in an often-pessimistic season, as the Taliban have appeared
to make inroads in some other places around the country where American troops
are pulling out.
In
interviews, villagers and local officials said that although the uprising grew
out of villagers’ anger at Taliban brutality, it gelled because of the growing
strength of the Afghan security forces and a particularly active police force
in the region. The new Panjwai police chief, Sultan Mohammad, is from Zangabad,
the name of the surrounding area, and his appointment in January galvanized
local support for the government.
“It’s
been a long time coming. But in short, the people have said enough is enough,
and they became fed up with the Taliban,” Maj. Gen. Robert B. Abrams, the
American commander in the south, said in a news briefing with Pentagon
reporters last week. He said the Taliban had been ousted from all but four
villages in the district at that point.
American
and Afghan forces have fought a grueling campaign in the districts of Kandahar
since the surge of 2010 when thousands of extra American troops were sent into
southern Afghanistan.
Although
the Taliban were routed in crucial areas that year, they maintained a grip in
the southern part of Panjwai, in the village clusters of Zangabad and Sperwan,
and threaded the area with improvised explosive devices and ambush sites.
Though
the surge of Western troops, and the increase in Afghan security forces that
followed, has brought greater security for much of Kandahar Province, in some
areas it also brought increased tensions with locals, and even greater violence
in some pockets.
Indeed,
one of the worst atrocities of the war occurred just a few hundred yards from
this village when 16 Afghan civilians were killed in their homes last year. An
American soldier, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, has been accused of killing the
civilians in a nighttime rampage, raising local anger against the government
and American forces in the region.
Yet
it was the Taliban’s callousness that caused the population to snap, Afghan
officials and the villagers here said. Between 300 and 400 civilians have been
killed or injured by bombs or ambushes by the Taliban in the past six months in
Panjwai, according to the district governor, Hajji Fazel Mohammad.
“People
are angry because the Taliban have been laying mines in their orchards and
vineyards,” he said in an interview at his district office. A member of the
Taliban would lay mines and then get killed and no one knew where the mines
were, he said. “People are now fed up with the Taliban and are joining us.”
The
spark came in early February when the Taliban commander of the area, Mullah
Noor Mahmad, 35, came to arrest men in this village. He called on the house of
Hajji Abdul Wudood and demanded the handover of two sons he accused of spying
for the government.
“They
wanted to slaughter my sons,” Mr. Wudood said in an interview last month in his
home. “They wanted to take them to the desert where they had a court and a
base.”
Mr.
Wudood, a 60-year-old former mujahedeen fighter against the Soviets in the
1980s, had had enough. He and his eight grown sons decided to make a stand.
Several
villagers who had lost relatives to the Taliban joined them. The village had
already been starting to boil: Three days earlier the same Taliban commander
had beaten up farmers who were clearing undergrowth from the village irrigation
canal.
Mr.
Wudood turned for help to the district police chief, Mr. Mohammad, an old
mujahedeen associate and a relative by marriage. Together they hatched a plan
to ambush the Taliban.
On
Feb. 6, they moved against a Taliban base in a nearby village. Seventy unarmed
villagers accompanied the police, guiding them through the minefields and
acting as lookouts. After a short firefight, the police routed the Taliban,
killing three men, and chasing the remainder south toward the desert.
Army
and police units pursued the Taliban down to their base on the edge of the
desert in the days after. As the word spread, dozens of villages showed their
support for the government and offered men for the Afghan Local Police forces
to guard their villages.
General
Abrams says the local support and expansion of government forces — he still
commands 17,000 troops in the region, and Afghan fighters now amount to 52,000
across various agencies — has coincided with a period of weakness for the
Taliban here, financially in particular. “They lack the money, they lack the
arms and ammunition, and they are having a challenge gathering their forces,”
he said, speaking by telephone from his headquarters at Kandahar airfield on
Tuesday.
The
head of Afghanistan’s National Security Directorate, Asadullah Khalid, a bitter
enemy of the Taliban who is still recovering in the United States from a
suicide attack against him in Kabul last year, said he had been trying to nurture
popular uprisings as a way to beat the Taliban.
“One
thing for sure is that the people are tired of the Taliban and they don’t want
the Taliban,” he said in an interview. “And when the people don’t want the
Taliban, the Taliban cannot come in. I feel this is the beginning of the end of
the Taliban, but the question is how can we use this.”
Provincial
and local leaders in Kandahar express pride at the uprising’s success so far,
but they warn that if the government does not follow through with increased
police support, the Taliban could undermine it all. “It all depends on what the
government does with these people,” said Hajji Agha Lalai, a member of
Kandahar’s provincial council. “If they support them and equip them, it will be
a revolution.”
Taliban
leaders were furious at losing Panjwai and have been plotting their return to
the district in meetings in the Pakistani town of Quetta this week, police and
intelligence officials said. One Taliban commander, who spoke on the condition
of anonymity during a telephone interview, acknowledged the loss of Panjwai,
but said the movement was starting to infiltrate more fighters into southern
Afghanistan along with workers coming in for the opium poppy harvest.
Last
weekend, two workers from a construction firm were kidnapped and killed in
Panjwai. Their bodies were found hanging in different villages near the desert
where Taliban fighters still have a presence, police officials said.
Mr.
Wudood said he had received warnings that the Taliban had ordered his
assassination. Yet he remained defiant.
“This
time it is not only me,” he said. “There are thousands of us in Zangabad and in
Sperwan. They cannot eliminate us all. We are the true owners of this land and
the men who are attacking us are coming from outside, and we are not scared. We
will defend our land.”
Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting from
Kabul, Afghanistan, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar
