Puli Alam (Afghanistan): The Taliban lured US forces into an elaborate trap to shoot down their helicopter, killing 30 American troops in the deadliest such incident of the war, an Afghan official said on Monday.
A total of 38 people — 30 US troops, many of them special forces, plus seven Afghan commandos and an interpreter — were killed when their Chinook came down during an anti-Taliban operation late Friday.
The crash marked the biggest single loss of life for American and NATO forces since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan toppled the Taliban in late 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks.
The senior government official told AFP on condition of anonymity that a Taliban commander, Qari Tahir, lured US forces to the scene by tipping them off that a Taliban meeting was taking place. He also said four Pakistanis helped Tahir carry out the strike. “Now it’s confirmed that the helicopter was shot down and it was a trap that was set by a Taliban commander,” said the official, citing intelligence gathered from the area. “The Taliban knew which route the helicopter would take,” he added.
“That’s the only route, so they took position on the either side of the valley on mountains and as the helicopter approached, they attacked it with rockets and other modern weapons. It was brought down by multiple shots.”
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to discuss the issue, also said President Hamid Karzai’s US-backed government “thinks this was a retaliation attack for the killing of Osama bin Laden.” (PTI)