February 2002

TIME: How the U.S. Killed the Wrong Soldiers

By MICHAEL WARE / URUZGAN with reporting by MARK THOMPSON / WASHINGTON

At first the U.S. military was quite proud of what it had done in this tiny hamlet tucked among orchards and snowcapped ridges north of Kandahar. In what appeared to be a perfect sneak attack, U.S. special-operations soldiers on Jan. 24 stormed Sharzam High School in Uruzgan. That same night, another unit conducted a similar commando raid at a military compound a mile away. In all, the soldiers killed 21 Afghans, who the U.S. claimed were Taliban, captured an additional 27 and destroyed troves of weapons and ammunition. All that, and only one U.S. soldier was hurt--and just barely. It was the most dramatic ground operation the U.S. has acknowledged since the opening weeks of the campaign in Afghanistan.

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TIME: How the U.S. Killed the Wrong Afghans

By MICHAEL WARE / URUZGAN

Uruzgan nestles in a pristine valley ringed by snow-capped peaks that form a natural fortress in the mountains north of Kandahar. Its orchards climb peacefully to the snowline, a spectacle of pastoral tranquility that belies the village's emergence as the site of the largest U.S. ground operation of the Afghan conflict — and the most tragic.

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TIME: Where Danger Lurks

By TIM McGIRK / KABUL with reporting by MARK THOMPSON / WASHINGTON and MICHAEL WARE / TARIN KOWT

On an icy, still night in Kabul, two weeks ago, Marine guards in full combat gear at the U.S. embassy were startled by the whoosh of a fireball exploding underneath wintry trees at the far end of the diplomatic compound. The resident bomb-disposal expert decided to wait until dawn before venturing out of the fortified embassy to investigate. That's what makes him an expert. The explosion was only a decoy. The real killer was a land mine that was invisible in the dark but was spotted in the daylight half buried. Says Corporal Matthew Roberson of the Marine antiterrorist unit at the embassy: "It looked like somebody did it so we'd come running out and step on the mine."

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TIME: Dead Men Talking

By MICHAEL WARE / KANDAHAR

Afghan commander Abdullah Lalai knew he faced a fight to the death as he waited outside a barricaded hospital ward. Inside were six al Qaeda fighters, armed with hand grenades and a pistol, whose seven weeks of defiance in the heart of Kandahar had become an embarrassment to the U.S. and anti-Taliban Afghan forces who controlled the city. But they had resisted every offer of surrender, and now it was left to Lalai and his American special forces comrades to resolve the standoff.

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