Marines have won Marjah battle and now fight for hearts and minds

Ben Farmer in Marjah Published: 6:00AM GMT 07 March 2010

Afghans walks at the back of US Marines during an operation in Marjah, Helmand range Photo: REUTERS

Backed by a force of multiform thousand US Marines, Colonel Brian Yuletide had fought his approach in to the Taliban building of Marjah with mercifully couple of casualties.

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But as he sat on a soiled straw mattress last Friday to discuss to the town"s newly-liberated residents, "Operation Back to School" refused to reveal utterly as smoothly.

It should, compared to prior days" taskings, have been comparatively elementary - convince Mohammed Omar, a internal schoolteacher, that it was protected to re-open his classrooms after the Taliban close them down. But Mr Omar presented one barrier that no volume of US infantry competence could overcome - fear.

"I am frightened about security," pronounced the whiskered 42-year-old, gesturing to the streets around him, where Taliban sympathisers were still believed to lurk.

"There will regularly be dangers from the Taliban until the people mount up opposite them," countered Col Christmas, reminding him that those same streets were right away full of infantry and Afghan police.

Mr Omar"s reply was short, and to the point, but it underlined the worry that has stubborn each day of the West"s bid to win Afghans over from the Taliban - not usually in the outrageous new descent opposite Marjah, but opposite the total country.

"You are not with us all the time," he retorted, as greybearded associate villagers nodded their agreement.

The Taliban might no longer run Marjah, during the illumination hours at least. But as the American forces and their British allies hasten to organize an administration department department that will connect their infantry success, they have far to go prior to they win over a aroused and wavering population. Like countless prior missions to take Taliban-controlled towns, locals are shocked that the unfamiliar infantry will vanish again after a couple of weeks or months - withdrawal them to face charges of "collaborating" when the militants afterwards return.

It was a fright that was done transparent to Col Yuletide last week, when The Sundaybecame the initial British journal to come in Marjah given it fell to US forces at the finish of February. The area, a building for Taliban drug production. has been the theme of the greatest infantry pull in Afghanistan given 2001, along with circuitously Nadi Ali where British infantry have led the attack.

Despite the insurgents right away being routed, the residents" concerns are not but foundation. Locals indicted of espionage were shot passed during the early days of the assault, and even now, the antagonistic stares from a small townsfolk show that not everyone is happy at being "liberated". On the sunrise of the colonel"s assembly with Mr Omar, supposed night letters had been pinned up by the Taliban, melancholy genocide for receiving anything from the Americans.

"We are at that proviso where the fighting has stopped, and what"s going to occur is possibly the competition is going to shift the way, or take a backseat and wait for for the summer fighting season," noticed Major Lawrence Lowman, 32, from South Carolina.

Taking a backseat is not an choice right right away for the US Marines. Commanders are right away in a competition opposite time to revive law and order, compensate for schools, clinics and infantry stations to be re-opened, and in all convince Marjah"s 60,000 townsfolk that hold up is improved underneath municipal administration department department than underneath the Taliban.

By a gift of history, it is not the initial time that Marjah has hosted Americans on a hearts-and-minds mission. Half a century ago, the locale was piece of a outrageous US growth plan that set up a array of indication villages and irrigated farmsteads. Yet whilst that scheme, written to deflect off Soviet influence, had years to bed in - and still unsuccessful - this time the Americans have a couple of weeks or months at most.

To that end, US Marine "civil affairs" specialists have come in armed with tens of thousands of dollars to get the locale up and using again. The jobless will be hired to reconstruct battle-damaged buildings, teachers and doctors will be paid salaries again, and those whose properties cannot be easy will embrace compensation. More than 200 Afghan civil-order police, seen as improved lerned and less hurtful than typical police, have additionally been bussed in to patrol. They, in turn, will be followed by a group of Afghan member of the Kabul system of administration - what US Marines call the "government in a box" - nonetheless the prospects have already been strike by reports that the man allocated as the town"s new district governor, Abdul Zahir, once served a prison tenure in Germany for stabbing his own stepson. He has denied the claims.

Ahead of the Afghan officials" arrival, Colonel Christmas, a sandy-haired 39-year-old from Virginia, has convened countless shuras, or Afghan councils, to ask elders for await and intelligence. Some have been stormy, others constructive.

"There"s no disbelief that in each one of those large meetings there is Taliban between them," he noted, calculating approximately that around one-fifth of the competition were possibly antagonistic to the Marines or demure to await them.

Omar Zad, a 22-year-old with a betimes elderly face who manages the locale motor fuel pump, was one of those who right away hopes for change. "There were not any schools, there were not any sports, there was usually fighting underneath the Taliban and afterwards they put landmines everywhere," he said.

Set amidst a prosaic desert, the area of abounding farmland around Marjah was combined by US growth assist from the 1950s onwards, with the goal of enlivening around dual million winding tribespeople to solve permanently. But in an relate of the difficulties that still dog bloc planners today, the intrigue was not well-tuned to internal needs. US journal reports of the time described "a humerous entertainment of errors", with new plantation machine lying resting in the fields for years.

Today, the unchanging grids of irrigation canals built by US engineers are still seemingly perceivable from the absolute Sea Stallion helicopters that packet Marines in to the town. However, the waterways are right away used to maintain drug poppy rather than wheat, that is grown be processed and ecstatic as heroin to the streets of Europe. The poppies are small some-more than ankle-height now, but in a couple of weeks, the collect will begin, generating millions of dollars that will be channnelled in to Taliban coffers.

Even so, though, the Marines are demure to dispossess the locale of the unlawful provision whilst the residents are still debating either or not to await the government.

Col Yuletide pronounced the subject of what to do with the tentative collect was a make a difference for the Afghan authorities in Kabul. Hopefully, he said, internal farmers could be swayed to grow opposite crops. But he added: "I don"t have a mission to exterminate poppy."

Meanwhile, Operation Back to School seems stranded on hold. Yesterday, the Marines convened a second shura with Mr Omar in a bid to shift his mind, but still met with no success. "I"m ready when you are," Col Yuletide told him.