Special from Background-Brief By Rowan Scarborough, The Washington Times Questions haunt the families of Extortion 17, the 2011 helicopter mission in Afghanistan that suffered the most U.S. military deaths in a single day in the war on terrorism. Every day, Charlie Strange, the father of one of the 30 Americans who died Aug. 6, 2011, […]
John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — As the clock ticks down to an American military pullout from Afghanistan in late 2014, civilian deaths in the troubled country have ticked up as Taliban insurgents focus on “soft targets” and set the scene for wider intimidation in the wake of a Western pullout. The number of Afghan […]
Jeffrey T. Kuhner What really happened to Navy SEAL Team Six? In August 2011, the elite special forces unit suffered the worst battlefield calamity in its history. A Taliban fighter shot down a Chinook helicopter carrying 22 Navy SEAL Team Six members in Afghanistan. All 38 persons on board — the Navy SEAL warriors, other […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Grace Vuoto At last, there will be a congressional inquiry into the strange circumstances surrounding the fatal helicopter crash in Afghanistan in August 2011, which resulted in the deaths of 30 American service members and 8 Afghans, including elite troops from Navy SEAL Team Six, the contingent who killed Osama bin […]
Special to WorldTribune.com LONDON — A leading Israeli unmanned aerial vehicle has reached a milestone in the NATO stabilization campaign in Afghanistan. Executives said the Heron-1 UAV, operated by the German military and Cassidian, has exceeded more than 15,000 flight hours in Afghanistan. Heron-1, produced by the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries, has been assigned to […]
Special to WorldTribune.com LONDON — A Taliban operative said specialists in urban warfare and technology have arrived in Syria to join the war against President Bashar Assad. The operative, Mohammed Amin, said at least 12 specialists were monitoring the war and drafting requirements for Al Qaida-aligned rebels. “There are dozens of Pakistani hopefuls in line […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com NEW DELHI — Why do high-powered U.S. diplomats persist in thinking that sitting around a table with the bad guys is going to produce a lasting peace and everyone will then live happily ever after? Apparently Washington never learned from years of yakking that resulted in the “Paris […]
Special to WorldTribune.com Compiled by Miles Yu, Geostrategy-Direct.com On June 16, the U.S. Army and Russia’s state-owned defense company Rosoboronexport signed a contract in Paris to buy 30 Mi-17V5 helicopters. The 30 Mi-17V5 helicopters will be used primarily for the U.S.-trained Afghan Army. They will remain in the country after U.S. forces are scheduled to […]
Sol W. Sanders For those of us who lived through it, current negotiations for the American exit from Afghanistan smells much too much like the end of the U.S. commitment in Vietnam. Washington, after a decade of enormous sacrifice of life and treasure, has chosen to negotiate with the enemy following diplomatic “modalities” pretty […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Grace Vuoto The media is now consistently referring to three scandals engulfing the Obama presidency, even using a shorthand expression such as a “trifecta” of troubling incidents. Yet, there is a scandal brewing that is worse than the Department of Justice violating freedom of the press, the Internal Revenue Service abusing […]