KANDAGAL, Afghanistan, 14 August 2005 — The US military has gone low-tech.
Frustrated with the limitations of using its fleet of modern Humvee four-wheel-drives in rugged mountains with few roads, a battalion of Marines has enlisted the help of transport vehicles that Afghan villagers have been using for centuries — donkeys.
About 30 of the animals have been rented from local farmers to haul food and bottled water to hundreds of Afghan and US troops on a major two-week operation to battle militants deep in remote mountains in eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar province.
“With all the smart bombs and the modern stuff in war nowadays, this is the best way for us to resupply our troops there,” said Lt. Col. Jim Donnellan, commander of 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, which is based in Hawaii. “It’s also much cheaper for the US taxpayer for us to rent the donkeys than for everything to be air-dropped.”
Using aircraft to resupply the forces is also dangerous. In late June, militants in the area shot down a special forces Chinook helicopter, killing all 16 troops on board, as it tried to land in one of the many steep-sided, wooded valleys that snake their way through the mountains.
The operation, which began Friday, is aimed at flushing those fighters out of the valley and US commanders are nervous about risking other choppers in the process. From a temporary resupply base in a corn field near Kandagal, a tiny village, at one end of Korengal Valley, where the militants are suspected of hiding, squads of Marines with heavy packs on their backs led out lines of donkeys, each laden with two boxes of water, a box of food rations and a sack of grain.
While each Marine carried enough food and water for themselves for two days, the donkeys gave each squad supplies for an extra 48 hours. Once finished, the animals would be led back to the resupply base to load up again and then return to the mountains.
Before coming to Afghanistan, some of the troops received training in handling donkeys at the Marines’ Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, Nevada, said Capt. John Moshane. “Marines have used donkeys since the American revolution,” he said, as each animal was being spray painted with a number for identification.
Still, the donkeys’ stubbornness to cooperate and their determination to try to mate with each other whenever they were untied persistently frustrated their handlers. When one Marine slapped one of the animals on the rump in exasperation, the donkey promptly gave him a sharp kick with one of its hind legs.
Donkeys have long been used by armies in Afghanistan, including by mujahedeen independence fighters against Soviet troops in the 1980s. They have also been popular with smugglers who use them to sneak loads of opium, illegally mined gems and timber across the country’s mountainous borders.
Meanwhile, severe flooding caused by torrential rains left at least two dead in eastern Afghanistan and washed away scores of homes, gardens and killed livestock, officials and witnesses said yesterday. The flash floods affected the districts of Mohmand Dara and Pachir Wa Agam, some 100 kilometers east of Kabul Friday evening.
“At least one person died and several others were wounded, hundreds of houses and agricultural farms were washed away in Pachir Wa Agam,” the district governor Haji Naeem Khan Shinwari told AFP. A woman was killed and four other men were wounded in the Mohmand Dara district of Nangarhar province. “A woman died after a wall collapsed over her and four other men were wounded as well,” Wazir Gull, a witness from Mohmand Dara, told AFP.
On June 30, five people died in floods in southeastern Khost province, while two weeks earlier flash floods and storms left 48 dead as they swept through the north and the east of the country. Afghanistan this year suffered its worst winter for a decade after seven years of drought and has little infrastructure to cope with flood waters resulting from storms and melting snow.
