Posted on 11/29/2007 10:07:39 PM PST by Jet Jaguar
POORAK, Afghanistan — Going to school can be deadly if you are a girl in Afghanistan. The Taliban believe that women should not have the opportunity of an education.
The roughly 400 girls enrolled at the Poorak Girls School in eastern Afghanistan’s Logar province were reminded of that on Thursday when two bombs were found by Afghan and U.S. forces. One, a hand grenade rigged to explode, was planted underneath the guard building at the school’s entrance.
“The Taliban do not want girls to go to school, to be educated or to grow up to be leaders,” said Col. Abdul Majeed Latifi, the deputy chief of police in Logar. “I am 100 percent sure this was the work of the Taliban.”
A U.S. Air Force explosives disposal team rushed in driving snow to the village upon getting the call from Latifi’s men early in the morning.
Upon arrival, Tech. Sgt. Michael Laskowski, 31, initially found a bomb placed underneath a footbridge in front of the school.
Its was made up of two Chinese-made 82 mm mortars, a two-foot-long recoilless rifle round and a pound of explosives material placed in a bag — all of it wired up to batteries.
The footbridge where the bomb was planted lay just 15 feet from an Afghan family’s front door.
The mother of the household opened her door only inches to speak with troops, saying, “We always have problems with Taliban here. We feel scared because the bomb was so close to our house. We don’t want our children to get hurt.” She said one of her daughters was enrolled in the school.
Her youngest son peeked through the crack of the door as Laskowski, an Anchorage, Alaska, native, had his two teammates gather the materials.
Defusing the bombs at the school was not as tricky as some of the team’s previous encounters, as Afghan policemen had taken the detonators out of the set-ups by hand. They wore no protection.
“They do everything physically because they don’t have the means or the equipment to deal with it properly,” Laskowski said.
Inside the school, the male headmaster was thankful that security forces had found the bombs, but he was visibly nervous. Behind the classroom doors, some 100 girls sat chatting with each other.
Military policemen from the 82nd Airborne Division’s 4th Brigade found an out-of-place wire leading over the rear wall of the school. A nearby door led troops to a short but steep hill where a creek ran, an indication of a possible “fatal funnel,” according to 1st Lt. Timothy Brooks.
“This could have been the point at which they would have attacked us as we gathered together in our search of the property — the wire was probably a distraction, or a tool to get us to this point,” Brooks said. “Then they would’ve been able to pick us off as we stood here trying to figure out the situation.”
The explosives, along with a collection of other munitions recovered from previous cache discoveries, were detonated at a site about 15 miles away from Poorak.
“We are glad they found the bombs because only Allah knows what would have happened,” said the worried mother whose house rested next to the largest bomb set up. “They found this one, but what will happen next?”
So glad these bombs were found and diffused..Good job, Air Force.
The Taliban hates smart women...
Chicom s__t now too, eh?
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