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| Afghanistan |
| Army is fighting British jihadists in Afghanistan |
| 2009-02-27 |
| British soldiers are engaged in "a surreal mini civil war" with growing numbers of homegrown jihadists who have travelled to Afghanistan to support the Taliban, senior army officers have told The Independent. Interceptions of Taliban communications have shown that British jihadists -- some "speaking with West Midlands accents" -- are active in Helmand and other parts of southern Afghanistan, according to briefing papers prepared by an official security agency. Estimate: MI5 has estimated that up to 4,000 British Muslims had travelled to Pakistan and, before the fall of the Taliban, to Afghanistan for military training. The main concern until now has been about the parts some of them had played in terrorist plots in the UK. Now there are signs that they are mounting missions against British and Western targets abroad. "We are now involved in a kind of surreal mini-British civil war a few thousand miles away," said an army officer. Somalia is also becoming a destination for British Muslims of Somali extraction who have started fighting alongside Al Qaeda-backed forces. A 21-year-old Briton of Somali extraction, who had been brought up in Ealing, west London, recently blew himself up in the town of Baidoa, killing 20 people. The head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, has raised the worrying issue of British citizens being indoctrinated in Somalia, and Michael Hayden, the outgoing head of the CIA, warned that the conflict in the Horn of Africa had "catalysed" expatriate Somalis in the West. But it is in Afghanistan that British forces are now directly facing fellow Britons on the other side. RAF Nimrod aircraft flying over Afghanistan at up to 40,000ft have been picking up Taliban electronic "chatter" in which voices can be heard in West Midlands and Yorkshire accents. Worryingly for the military, this has increased in the past few months, with communications picked up by both ground and air surveillance, showing the presence of more British voices in the Taliban frontline. The men involved are said to try to hide their British connections but sometimes "fall back" into speaking English. One senior military source said: "We have been hearing a lot more Punjabi, Urdu and Kashmiri Urdu rather than just Pashtu, so there appears to be more men from other parts of Pakistan fighting with the Taliban than just the Pashtuns who have tribal allegiances with the Afghan Pashtuns. Last week, during a visit to Helmand, the Foreign Secretary, David Milliband, was shown Taliban explosive devices containing British-made electronic components. An explosives officer said the devices had either been sent from Britain, or brought over to the country. Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, the chairman of the Commons' sub-committee on anti-terrorism, said: "We know the problem we have with UK-based jihadists. We also know that a number of them have been arrested trying to leave the country. With the UK intelligence services at full stretch, it is not surprising some of these jihadists had ended up in Afghanistan." Brigadier Ed Butler, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, said British Muslims were fighting his forces. "There are British passport holders who live in the UK who are being found in places such as Kandahar," he said. Last week, as Barack Obama ordered 17,000 extra US troops into Afghanistan, a confidential NATO report revealed that more than 30 percent of the population believed the government of President Hamid Karzai had lost control of the areas in which they live and much of that has slipped back into Taliban control. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #16 *happy sigh* Learning!! Thank you twice for that, Jim dear, and a third time for putting back your C. I didn't think you meant to annoy, only that you didn't notice one of the things I get silly about. May I buy you a drink in the O Club to make up for it? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2009-02-27 22:19 |
| #15 Simply put, MT stands for Morse Taper (Yes the same Morse that invented Morse code) It's an Quick Change adapter for drills, centers and such in heavy machinery such as huge platform drills (capable of drilling holes at to 6 inches in diameter or larger, (although huge holes are usually not drilled at all, but bored, it's faster)and changing them is very easy, it's a round shallow taper sliced into different sizes, smallest is 1 Morse, and is about 3/4 inch at the big end and 1/2 or so at the small end, the beauty of Morse tapers is that you can simply slam them together by hand and they'll transmit a huge twisting force without slipping, to disconnect, a tapered wedge and a small hammer is used a few taps and they release easily, the trick here is a 5 MT is about 2 inches across the big end and 1 3/4 at the small end, Saying "I'm a 5 MT" implies a huge male appendage. Off topic, OK TW the idea wasn't to irritate, the "C"s' back. JIM |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2009-02-27 18:59 |
| #14 What is a 5 MT, Redneck Jim? (Sorry, that missing C, unimportant as it is, has been driving me nuts. Please, please put it back!) |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2009-02-27 16:43 |
| #13 Half empty, Jim. Half empty. |
| Posted by: lotp 2009-02-27 16:34 |
| #12 By the way, as a machinist I know what a 5 MT really is, I also know there's no such thing as a point 5 MT. |
| Posted by: Rednek Jim 2009-02-27 16:32 |
| #11 Ummmm .... .5mt mangles the language deliberately, in case that wasn't obvious ..... |
| Posted by: lotp 2009-02-27 16:31 |
| #10 I know many teachers, it's sorta irrelevant, only would count if he's an "American English" Teacher, otherwise he'd not need to be good in English. By the way, he's fair, but the idioms escape him, no harm, no foul. I offer in friendship, not as snark. |
| Posted by: Rednek Jim 2009-02-27 16:18 |
| #9 sad thing, Jim, is half is a teechur |
| Posted by: Frank G 2009-02-27 15:02 |
| #8 5MT, contact me for help with your english, I'll be glad to help. |
| Posted by: Rednek Jim 2009-02-27 13:27 |
| #7 The War of the Revolution did have a build-in Civil War - nasty one too. |
| Posted by: .5MT 2009-02-27 13:15 |
| #6 Anonymous, by that definition, the American Revolution was a civil war, we were all British at the time. |
| Posted by: Rednek Jim 2009-02-27 13:02 |
| #5 Civil war means two sides from a same people or Nation are fighting each others; here, you've got british fighting against muslim pakistaneses and arabs and possibly others, living in GB, but who certainly wouldn't even themselves think they're british, whatever the ID paper may say. It's actually kinda a decolonization war at distance, with the indigenous brits fighting against their colonizers... in afghanistan. How surreal. |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2009-02-27 12:22 |
| #4 Two competing opportunities here: with that many Brit-Pakis in the Taliban it ought to be relatively easy to emplace some spies. If Britain cannot or will not emplace spies, then they can let it leak that they have emplaced many spies. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2009-02-27 09:43 |
| #3 Fly them all back to the RAF Burtonwood Detention Center. It's close to Manchester and they can see their loved ones on week ends and holidays. Burtonwood has long since closed? hmmm well.... |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2009-02-27 07:36 |
| #2 Think of it as training for liberating Manchester from Islamic occupation. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2009-02-27 05:22 |
| #1 What an opportunity to thin the herd! Remember, chaps, every one killed over there won't be going home to plot mischief... just like what happened in Iraq. Roach motel, I recall some Rantburgers calling it. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2009-02-27 00:40 |