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Military Divers Find Body Of Missing American Soldier In Afghanistan
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New York Times
November 12, 2009
Military Divers Find Body Of Missing American Soldier In Afghanistan
By Alissa J. Rubin
KABUL, Afghanistan — A week after two American soldiers disappeared in northwest Afghanistan, the body of one of them has been found by a military dive team, a NATO spokesman said Wednesday.
The two men disappeared while trying to recover supplies that had fallen into a river in Badghis Province on Nov. 4, news agencies reported.
Shortly after the soldiers were reported missing, a Taliban spokesman said that militants had recovered the bodies of two drowned foreign soldiers. It was broadly assumed that the bodies were those of the missing soldiers. The recovery of the body of one soldier, identified by family members on a Facebook page as Benjamin Sherman, throws the Taliban claim into question.
It was unclear how the military dive team located the soldier, or exactly where his body was found. The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said it continued to search for the other missing soldier.
Both were paratroopers with the Fourth Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division.
A joint Afghan-American rescue mission that went to search for the soldiers last week was attacked by local Taliban forces. When an airstrike was called in by the Americans, at least seven Afghan soldiers and police officers were killed, as well as one civilian traveling with them, according to the Afghan Defense Ministry.
NATO has not yet confirmed that an airstrike was responsible for the deaths. The alliance said it was investigating whether the airstrike killed people and whether it wounded five American soldiers as well as a number of Afghan servicemen at the scene.
In the aftermath of the airstrike, local elders said they secured a promise from the Taliban not to attack the search party while it was trying to recover the bodies.
In another episode, a suicide bomber on a motorcycle attacked a NATO convoy on Wednesday as it passed through a bazaar in Shah Juy, a town on the main road between Kandahar and Kabul. A woman was killed, and three civilians and two NATO soldiers were wounded, said Gulab Shah Alikhail, the deputy governor of Zabul Province. The bazaar has often been a target of insurgents.
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"Most of us here can attest that we never took the easy way. Easy just is............easy. Life is a work in progress, and most of the time its a struggle." ~ Me
"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
"A Government that is losing to an insurgency is not being outfought, it is being out governed." Bernard B. Fall
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