Taliban likely to switch to 'terror-style attacks'
Taliban likely to switch to 'terror-style attacks'
Agencies, Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan
With the enemy regrouping following Operation Anaconda, coalition forces suspect that Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters will make a shift toward pinprick attacks directed at Western targets inside Afghanistan, a British intelligence officer said on Wednesday.
With more British Royal Marines arriving early on Wednesday, and hundreds of American soldiers heading home, the U.S.-led mission here in Afghanistan is in a transitional phase following the biggest offensive in the Afghan war.
That battle showed that the Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives may need to reassess their tactics and move more toward attacks in a "variety of terrorist styles," said Maj. Tony De Reya, an intelligence officer with the Marines.
"The threat to Westerners here is very real," he said.
He said that forecast was based on theory, rather than intelligence about specific attacks on soldiers, journalists or local leaders.
De Reya spoke at Bagram Air Base, where some 110 of Britain's elite Royal Marines landed in Wednesday's early hours -- part of Britain's first overseas combat deployment since the Gulf War a decade ago.
Shielded by darkness, the first 60 of two waves of 45 Commando Royal Marines came pouring off a hulking C-130 transport plane at Bagram, about an hour's drive north of the capital Kabul. Another 50 Royal Marines, whose base is in Arbroath, Scotland, followed.
The Royal Marines are trained in mountain warfare and will join the U.S.-led coalition hunting pockets of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters hunkered down among the mountain peaks in Afghanistan.
In Kabul, meanwhile, the first soldiers in Afghanistan's fledgling army graduated on Wednesday in an event Afghan leader Hamid Karzai hailed as an end to warlords.
The 600 soldiers, trained from scratch for the past six weeks by international peacekeepers, put on a spectacular display of military moves at their graduation ceremony attended by Karzai and top diplomats, as well as senior foreign military officers.
Karzai said the ceremony -- which marked the rebirth of a formal Afghan Army for the first time since the country descended into civil war 10 years ago after the withdrawal of Soviet Union -- was one of the proudest moments of his five months in power.
"I feel like a volcano of emotion," he told a news conference.
Drawn from all of Afghanistan's multitude of ethnic groups and geographic areas, the soldiers were the first in a standing army that military analysts say needs to be at least 60,000 strong, a figure that could take years to reach.
The 30 officers commanding the 600 troops of the First Battalion, Afghan Army were selected from each of the country's 30 provinces.
With Afghanistan's long history of local warlords running their own fiefdoms, including security in them, there had been fears an effective army could never be formed.
But Karzai said after decades of wars, the Afghan people were ready for a strong central army. "We will not allow groups of armed people or gangs to call themselves armies," he said.
"In other words, no warlordism.
The first soldiers will be used initially as part of Karzai's presidential guard.
In 1992, Afghanistan slumped into civil war with the withdrawal of the Soviets, and in 1996 the hardline Taliban took over using their own guerrilla-type forces, including many foreigners such as members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
They were driven from power last December by U.S.-led forces.