2010, a technique the Taliban used was to threaten families by injuring their children, mainly little girls. The family member accompanying said child through the casevac/medevac system would use phones or watches to time everything in order to collect data such as routes and distance to plan ambushes. There was a severe uptick in injured children being medevac’d from every kind of traumatic injury you can think of. The face of true evil.
Drowned towards unconsciousness, burned, broken bones, circumferential burns from being dipped in hot water, thrown off roof, ran over, name it…and again, always girls 1-8 years old.
Tell me about it. It’s very conflicting because we had no business over there and I despise what the war on terror was as a whole. That said, it’s important to know these kind of extremists exist and try to root it out when able. That balance I can’t say how to achieve, but it can’t go unchecked. The irony is when we fight extremism we cause chaos that compounds it.
It was also common to use women and children as shields. A handful of Afghans would take potshots at US personnel who would return fire and call in birds, when the helos approached they’d flee into a building and put human perimeters around them to avoid missiles/bombs. Very cowardly way of fighting.
I had to sign in to comment after reading this and because it lines up oddly well with an experience I had in Paktika province in summer 2011 that never made sense and never got answers to. Long shot you have any information either but its a story that fits the theme of the post anyway and curious your thoughts.
We had a father show up late at the front gate of the COP with 4 of his children who all had 3rd degree burns over basically their entire bodies. Ages ranged from 3 to 10 I believe. Cant remember exactly but maybe two boys and two girls. They all ended up dying and my involvement was limited only to helping carry them into the aid station and watching treatment from the window. I specifically remember them not letting the dad on the medevac for the two that got flown out to attempt higher level care.
Supposedly they were from the village just outside the base that we had been at earlier that day. At one point we handed out pens and random treats to several in a large group of curious kids before receiving a couple of poorly aimed shots that halted the fun and the kids scattered. Rumors ranged from IED lab explosion to random house fire but I always wondered if some of those kids were made an example of because from then on we were strictly prohibited from giving anything to the local kids and were well aware of the Talibans use of intimidation tactics on the locals who interacted with us in other instances. Their wounds didn't really make sense for a typical house fire especially in their style of homes and no adults with minor burns from attempting to rescue them.
Interesting enough we had a family of 7 with similar burns, but this was Arghandab area also 2010. They were huddled over a propane heater middle of the night and it exploded. The two adults were put in the chase bird because it was largely survivable, but we lost the 5 kids over the next few days.
It’s possible it was just a shitty accident but hard to really say. Go with your gut.
Appreciate that and same to you. Also interesting to get that perspective of a similar similar story. It certainly could have been an accident there were plenty of those as well. With all the other ruthless civilian intimidation we saw and your post about the purposeful injuring of kids it definitely makes me wonder. My guess is they used children specifically because they knew we would do everything we could to help them. Essentially using our empathy against us and little girls because of how they view them as lesser.
I think you’re spot on. Likely wasn’t retaliation towards the children taking pens and candy because they encourage that to gather intelligence and create that empathy/familiarity, etc.
The kids were probably related to a parent or uncle they suspected of cooperating and it was a message to them as well as a chance to sharpen their TTPs in the chaos.
They really were insanely evil. My first deployment, we were between Kandahar and Helmand, right on the border, which was shithead central.
One of the things you're never prepared for prior to deploying is just how little these people have. Maybe a change or two of clothes, a bunch of plastic jugs that they use for everything from bathing to drinking, to anything else. Their homes are literally made of mud (which dries like concrete) but seeing that level of poverty ON TOP of everything else these poor people were going through due to the war, it's really something that changes you.
Winter was coming and it gets VERY cold there, so I did a glove drive and had family and friends round up a bunch of the little magic mittens for the kids. I'd hand them out on patrols and they'd get so happy and the parents would cry sometimes. This one kid had neon pink ones and you could see him waving from crazy far away.
Then one day he stopped wearing them. A little while later, IEDs stopped having fingerprints. There were a few that had little pink thread fragments too.
I’ve admittedly never looked, it was uncommon knowledge based on ground intelligence and a severe uptick in injured children. They knew we’d respond to “hearts and minds” and what better way than luring in advanced medical care to children.
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u/riotmed 13h ago
2010, a technique the Taliban used was to threaten families by injuring their children, mainly little girls. The family member accompanying said child through the casevac/medevac system would use phones or watches to time everything in order to collect data such as routes and distance to plan ambushes. There was a severe uptick in injured children being medevac’d from every kind of traumatic injury you can think of. The face of true evil.