Marja

MARJA, AFGHANISTAN -- U.S. Marines and Afghan soldiers encountered pockets of stiff resistance and extensive minefields as they sought to press into this Taliban sanctuary in southern Afghanistan on Saturday. Numerous gunfights with insurgents and painstaking efforts to clear roads of makeshift bombs slowed the advance of many coalition units and delayed them from reaching some key destinations in this farming area of 80,000 people. The operation was further complicated by the challenge of fording irrigation canals that ring the area...

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. — A brigade of U.S. Marines that evicted Taliban insurgents from a broad swath of southern Afghanistan received the nation's highest collective military honor at a ceremony here Friday. Troops of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, who engaged in pitched fighting along the Helmand River Valley, are the first conventional forces in the nearly 11-year-long Afghan war to be awarded the Presidential Unit Citation. The brigade "brought the fight to the heart of the insurgency," Navy...

KABUL -- The sixth day of the military offensive in southern Afghanistan proved the deadliest so far as four NATO troops were killed in bombings and gun battles during the painstaking push to take back a Taliban stronghold. From the beginning of the operation in Marja -- the biggest joint military operation of the war -- coalition troops have encountered sporadic gunfire and a host of roadside bombs, many detected before they could cause damage or injury. But the Taliban resistance has appeared to intensify rather than diminish...

Paul Jones arrived in a Chevy pickup, dust clouds billowing as he crossed the desert. He had set out soon after first light from his base in southern Afghanistan, an encampment that, thanks to his employer's logistics savvy, had an ample supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Almost everything there had been sent by sea from California or Oregon, and then trucked up from Pakistan. The 63-year-old, khaki-clad engineer came that February morning to observe a massive development project aimed at transforming the valley along the...

MARJA, AFGHANISTAN -- On the satellite photographs of Marja that Marines scrutinized before launching a massive assault against the Taliban a week ago , what they assumed was the municipal government center appeared to be a large, rectangular building, cater-cornered from the main police station. Seizing that intersection became a key objective, one deemed essential to imposing authority and beginning reconstruction in this part of Helmand province once U.S. and Afghan troops have flushed out the insurgents.

MARJA, AFGHANISTAN -- The Afghan official responsible for governing Marja paid his first visit to this strife-torn community Monday, imploring residents to forsake the Taliban and promising employment programs as an inducement for local men to put down their weapons. Haji Zahir, the newly appointed mayor of Marja, told a group of about 50 elderly men who had gathered at a gas station near the main bazaar that the large U.S. and Afghan military operation to flush out the Taliban is intended to bring "positive...

MARJA, AFGHANISTAN -- U.S. and Afghan troops moved into two key parts of Marja on Tuesday in an effort to restart government services and confront Taliban holdouts who continue to shoot at coalition forces. Facing little resistance, troops secured the central police station and the area where they hope to build a municipal building, moving west by foot on a mine-infested road to achieve a key objective of U.S. commanders. To the north, in the chockablock Koru Chreh bazaar area, where troops had been...

MARJA, AFGHANISTAN -- For the Marines of Charlie Company's 3rd Platoon, Sunday's mission was simple enough: Head west for a little more than a mile to link up with Alpha Company in preparation for a mission to secure the few ramshackle government buildings in this farming community. It would take nine hours to walk that distance, a journey that would reveal the danger and complexity of the Marines' effort to wrest control of Marja from the Taliban. The operation to secure the area, which began with...

A year ago, the mention of Marja, a speck on the map in southern Afghanistan , would have drawn befuddled stares in the Pentagon. Today the town of 50,000 is the target of the largest U.S.-NATO military operation since 2001. U.S. commanders are describing the dusty Afghan outpost as a "cancer," a key center of opium production in Afghanistan's poppy belt and an area critical to the Taliban's power. Marja is indeed a Taliban stronghold, and the resistance there is real. Nine U.S. troops have been reported...

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. — A brigade of U.S. Marines that evicted Taliban insurgents from a broad swath of southern Afghanistan received the nation's highest collective military honor at a ceremony here Friday. Troops of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, who engaged in pitched fighting along the Helmand River Valley, are the first conventional forces in the nearly 11-year-long Afghan war to be awarded the Presidential Unit Citation. The brigade "brought the fight to the heart...

MARJA, Afghanistan — Surrounded by quiet tribesmen with AK-47s slung over their shoulders, Haji Asaf said he expects the Taliban will kill him if given the chance. The village elder works with the Marines, who pay his force of more than 60 men $150 a month each to guard this southern Afghan district's flat-roofed farmsteads. He advises his American allies about which smuggling routes to block and where to build new schools. "Every three miles," Asaf said about the schools, "because if it's too far to walk, they won't...

Even as Marines in Afghanistan continued to fight for control of the Taliban stronghold of Marja, senior Obama administration officials said Friday that the United States has begun initial planning for a bigger, more complex offensive in Kandahar later this year. The assault on Marja , the largest U.S.-NATO military operation since 2001, is a "prelude to larger, more comprehensive operations," senior Obama officials said Friday. Administration officials declined to say when the Kandahar offensive will...

I am grateful for your informative and timely Feb. 11 news story "A reemergence in the heart of Pakistan. " The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community has experienced intense persecution since Pakistan's founding. Both my grandfather and my uncle were murdered simply because they were Ahmedi Muslims. I disagree, however, with the characterization of the Ahmadiyyat's founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, as a "rival prophet. " Ahmad claimed to be the promised messiah who the Islamic prophet Muhammad...

MARJA, AFGHANISTAN -- The Afghan official responsible for governing Marja paid his first visit to this strife-torn community Monday, imploring residents to forsake the Taliban and promising employment programs as an inducement for local men to put down their weapons. Haji Zahir, the newly appointed mayor of Marja, told a group of about 50 elderly men who had gathered at a gas station near the main bazaar that the large U.S. and Afghan military operation to flush out the Taliban is intended to bring "positive changes.

AFGHANISTAN Outnumbered and outgunned, Taliban fighters are mounting a tougher fight than expected in Marja, Afghan officials said Sunday, as U.S.-led forces converged on a pocket of militants in a western section of the town. Despite ongoing fighting, the newly appointed civilian chief for Marja said he plans to fly into the town Monday for the first time since the attack to begin restoring Afghan government control and winning over the population after years of Taliban rule.

AFGHANISTAN WAR Predicting that the level of U.S. casualties in the fight to win control of the southern Afghan town of Marja will be "tough" to bear, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus said Sunday that the assault is just the beginning of a 12-to-18-month campaign to wipe out havens for the Taliban and other Islamist militants. "These types of efforts are hard, and they're hard all the time," Petraeus said. "I don't use words like 'optimist' or 'pessimist.' I use 'realist.' . . . We're in Afghanistan to ensure it cannot once again be a sanctuary for the...

CAMP LEATHERNECK, AFGHANISTAN -- In the late 1950s, scores of U.S. engineers transformed a swath of uninhabited desert in southern Afghanistan into verdant farmland by constructing a network of irrigation canals fed by the Helmand River. The Afghan government filled the area, which it called Marja, with Pashtun nomads and told them to grow wheat. The wheat fields have since been replaced by tracts of opium-producing poppies. The mud-walled compounds that once housed families now conceal drug-processing labs and roadside-bomb factories.

MARJA, Afghanistan — Surrounded by quiet tribesmen with AK-47s slung over their shoulders, Haji Asaf said he expects the Taliban will kill him if given the chance. The village elder works with the Marines, who pay his force of more than 60 men $150 a month each to guard this southern Afghan district's flat-roofed farmsteads. He advises his American allies about which smuggling routes to block and where to build new schools. "Every three miles," Asaf said about the schools, "because if it's too far...

A year ago, the mention of Marja, a speck on the map in southern Afghanistan , would have drawn befuddled stares in the Pentagon. Today the town of 50,000 is the target of the largest U.S.-NATO military operation since 2001. U.S. commanders are describing the dusty Afghan outpost as a "cancer," a key center of opium production in Afghanistan's poppy belt and an area critical to the Taliban's power. Marja is indeed a Taliban stronghold, and the resistance there is real. Nine U.S. troops have been reported killed from roadside...

MARJA, AFGHANISTAN -- On the satellite photographs of Marja that Marines scrutinized before launching a massive assault against the Taliban a week ago , what they assumed was the municipal government center appeared to be a large, rectangular building, cater-cornered from the main police station. Seizing that intersection became a key objective, one deemed essential to imposing authority and beginning reconstruction in this part of Helmand province once U.S. and Afghan troops have flushed out the...