Afghanistan/France

French troops were betrayed, says paper

Article published on the 2008-08-27 Latest update 2008-08-27 13:15 TU

French President Nicolas Sarkozy meets soldiers wounded in the ambush on Tuesday
(Photo: Reuters)

The French weekly paper Le Canard enchainé on Wednesday claimed that the whereabouts of French troops caught in a deadly ambush near Kabul on 18 August was passed on to their attackers, either by their interpreter or by Afghan police or soldiers. The attack, in which ten soldiers died, prompted a parliamentary enquiry which met on Tuesday.

The interpreter accompanying the French soldiers disappeared a few hours before they set out on the operation about 50 kilometres east of the Afghan capital, according to an article signed by Le Canard enchainé's editor, Claude Angeli.

"Common sense should have led his superiors to fear that he had warned the insurgents of the arrival of this 'patrol'," Angeli continues.

The usually well-connected paper claims that officials in Paris accept that the Taliban attackers had been warned, either by the interpreter or by Afghan soldiers or police.

It also claims that four French soldiers were captured and executed at the very beginning of the ambush.

On Tuesday, Defence Minister Hervé Morin told a parlaimentary enquiry that there had been no errors of command but that lessons would be learnt from the ambush.

He and Foreign Affairs Minister Bernard Kouchner defended France's recently increased participation in the international force in Afghanistan before a joint meeting of the two National Assembly committees that oversee their fields of competence.

Morin insisted that the situation in Afghanistan today is not a war, while Kouchner conceded that the military clashes involved are "the same as war".

But both insisted that, since the international force has a mandate from the UN, it is not a war against the Afghan people nor is it an imperialist venture.

A German soldier was killed in an attack in the northern city of Kunduz on Wednesday, while the body of a Japanese aid-worker, who was captured on Tuesday, has been found riddled with bullets.

A UN enquiry into  last week's attack on a village near Herat has found that 90 Afghan civilians were killed, 60 of them children. The Afghan government has ordered that foreign military operations on its soil will be subject to new rules enforceable under international law.