On Feb. eight an Afghan soldier turned his American-supplied M249 gentle machine gun on a gaggle of American and Afghan commandos who have been hud
On Feb. eight an Afghan soldier turned his American-supplied M249 gentle machine gun on a gaggle of American and Afghan commandos who have been huddled and patiently ready for an airlift from a small base in japanese Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province.
The burst of fireside killed Workers Sgt. Javier J. Gutierrez and Workers Sgt. Antonio R. Rodriguez and wounded six different Individuals. A short gun battle adopted because the U.S. troops struggled to discern associates from foe. The 2 sergeants and their American Particular Forces staff have been betrayed by Sergeant Jawed, an Afghan Military soldier who glided by a single title. Insider assaults, often known as “inexperienced on blue,” are a staple of the battle, and a bitterly unhappy and deadly expression of the deep mistrust each Afghan and American forces typically have towards each other.
Sergeant Jawed was a six-year veteran of the very drive the Pentagon helped create and equip. The weapon he used within the assault was one of many lots of of hundreds doled out by the USA over the course of the 18-year-long conflict. By various tallies, the Pentagon has equipped roughly 465,000 small arms to Afghan safety forces, bought and dispatched from no less than 18 international locations. The weapons included the wooden-stocked Soviet Kalashnikov rifle and the jet-black American M16 — along with sniper rifles, pistols, machine weapons and even anti-tank recoilless rifles, despite the fact that the Taliban insurgency hasn’t possessed tanks since 2001.
And although the weapons have been meant for the Afghan military and police forces, the army’s failure to doc how and to the place they have been distributed has meant lots of them discovered their manner into the fingers of militant teams all through Afghanistan and the Center East. In 2013, the inspector general for Afghan reconstruction reported that 43 % of the Division of Protection’s data for small arms despatched to Afghanistan have been lacking info or have been duplicates.
This near-continuous arms stream has value hundreds of thousands in taxpayers {dollars}, a few of which stays unaccounted for, together with many weapons themselves. The Protection Division’s failure to trace and keep these weapons is a results of the convoluted forms that fuels protection contracts and Washington’s need to construct a military and police drive shortly from scratch.
In recent times, the Pentagon has tried to enhance its strategies for monitoring the weapons, however low literacy charges have made it troublesome for Afghan troopers and armorers to take care of correct data.
As soon as a standing image for senior commanders and insurgents, the American-made M16 — simply bought, misplaced or taken from the battlefield — is now seemingly as prevalent because the Soviet-style rifles that make up a lot of the insurgency’s arsenal.
Pickup vehicles, armored Humvees and evening imaginative and prescient goggles have additionally discovered their manner into Taliban fingers. The costly goggles have given the group the higher hand lately when attacking far-flung Afghan checkpoints and outposts throughout the nation. Between 2014 and 2017, the Taliban greater than doubled their nighttime assaults due to night-vision units, in accordance with one United States army official who in 2018 described inner Pentagon information.
The weapon Sergeant Jawed used, a M249 Squad Computerized Weapon, is an American army mainstay and has been used because the 1980s, typically serving because the pillar of computerized hearth for the four-man hearth groups that type a 12-man squad. It’s unclear what number of have been equipped to Afghan forces, who have been initially supplied with Soviet-style arms within the early years of the conflict earlier than the Individuals moved to standardize the military with NATO weapons.
Made by Fabrique Nationale Herstal, the M249 weighs round 15 kilos, and extra if loaded with its typical belt of 100 to 200 rounds of 5.56×45-millimeter ammunition. The U.S. army suggests holding the M249’s charge of fireside beneath 200 rounds a minute to forestall the barrel from melting. The weapon is vulnerable to jamming, but when cared for by a educated operator who is aware of the unusual intricacies which are frequent to open-bolt machine weapons, it might probably distribute an unrelenting quantity of bullets.
On the website the place Sergeants Gutierrez and Rodriguez have been killed, The Occasions recognized no less than 43 bullet holes on the concrete wall behind the Individuals, and eight extra on a taller empty oil tanker behind the wall. Sergeant Jawed fired for under a matter of seconds, earlier than he was shot and killed by an American guard in a close-by tower.
The circumstances of why he turned the rifle on his American and Afghan counterparts stay unclear, as do the main points of the machine gun he used: its serial quantity, when it was despatched to Afghanistan, or if it was issued to him, given to him by a comrade or picked up within the moments earlier than the killing.
However little info is required to convey the sorrow of two American deaths attributable to the very weapon that their authorities equipped, the newest in a conflict that appears little like what its organizers predicted.
Mujib Mashal and Zabihullah Ghazi contributed…