Special Forces Assassins Infiltrate Taliban Stronghold in Afghanistan

[Team Sergeant]

OK, my question concerning this article, which SF MOS does "ASSASSIN" fall under??? And how many of you guys have had "Assassin" training? (Did I miss an advanced course?)

Team Sergeant



Special Forces Assassins Infiltrate Taliban Stronghold in Afghanistan

Sunday, February 07, 2010


Print ShareThisAmerican and British troops poised to assault the Taliban stronghold of Marjah have begun targeting insurgent leaders for assassination.

Military sources said special forces had been infiltrating the town on "kinetic" missions — jargon for armed attacks. "Special forces guys have been going in on assassination missions with the aim of decapitating the Taliban force," one said.

At the British base of Camp Bastion and the adjoining Camp Leatherneck, the U.S. Marine base, troops and munitions have been airlifted in by night to avoid enemy rockets. It is clear that international forces are on the brink of a big battle. All Saturday morning, the thud-thud-thud of heavy machine guns and the crump of mortars filled the air.

In a break from traditional military secrecy, American, British and Afghan commanders have announced that Marjah, the last town in Helmand under Taliban control, will be attacked.

Operation Moshtarak (“Together”) will be by far the largest offensive since General Stanley McChrystal, the American commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, instigated his counter-insurgency strategy, backed by President Obama’s 30,000-troop "surge."

About 1,000 Taliban, mostly Afghans but with some foreign fighters in their ranks, are believed to be in Marjah, an opium centre and local headquarters for bomb-making and sending out homicide bombers.

Military sources described the use of publicity as a psychological tactic to intimidate the Taliban into laying down their weapons or fleeing.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,585035,00.html

[Utah Bob]

Assassin's Creed is the big rage in video games this season. Assassin's are cool now.Guaranteed to get people's attention and read the article that way I guess.

So that's what SFA stands for. Who knew?

[rubberneck]

According to Syemour Hersh the MOS for SF assassins is 18N(inja).

[Team Sergeant]

I especially like the cryptic "kinetic" missions line.

Is that the new British media approved, politically correct term for shooting people? For gods sake I hope they're not profiling the taliban before they shoot them!

TS

I'm betting our next Special Forces Green Beret "fake/fraud" will have "Special Forces ASSASSIN course 3-10" in his online resume.

[Sdiver]

Interesting "choice" of wording in the Headline....

Special Forces Assassins Infiltrate Taliban Stronghold in Afghanistan

....seeing as how the word Assassin originates from this area.

1: One who murders by surprise attack, especially one who carries out a plot to kill a prominent person.

2: Assassin A member of a secret order of Muslims who terrorized and killed Christian Crusaders and others.

Word History: Active in Persia and Syria from the 8th to 14th centuries, the original Assassins were members of the Nizaris, a Muslim group who opposed the Abbasid caliphate with threats of sudden assassination by their secret agents. Other populations of the area regarded the Nizaris as unorthodox outcasts, and from this attitude came one of the names for the group, ḥaššāšīn, a word originally meaning "hashish users," which had become a general term of abuse. Reliable sources offer no evidence of hashish use by Nizari agents, but sensationalistic stories of murderous, drug-crazed ḥaššāšīn or Assassins were widely repeated in Europe. Marco Polo tells a tale of how young Assassins were given a potion and made to yearn for paradise—their reward for dying in action—by being given a life of pleasure. As the legends spread, the word ḥaššāšīn passed through French or Italian and appeared in English as assassin in the 16th century, already with meanings like "treacherous killer."

So I guess one could say, this has come "Full Circle" and that these "SF Assassins" are only to happy to "spread the word".

[orion5]

Chicks dig assassins.

And dead Taliban.

[Utah Bob]

Originally Posted by Team Sergeant

I especially like the cryptic "kinetic" missions line.

Is that the new British media approved, politically correct term for shooting people? For gods sake I hope they're not profiling the taliban before they shoot them!

TS

I'm betting our next Special Forces Green Beret "fake/fraud" will have "Special Forces ASSASSIN course 3-10" in his online resume.

If they're in profile, I suggest one above the ear canal.

Originally Posted by Team Sergeant

OK, my question concerning this article, which SF MOS does "ASSASSIN" fall under??? And how many of you guys have had "Assassin" training? (Did I miss an advanced course?)

Team Sergeant

Not unless you missed the part where you were taught the technique of bashing a head in with an E-tool.

But watching the entire 32 movies of James Bond weighs equally to an online correspondence course.

[Dozer523]

Originally Posted by Team Sergeant

OK, my question concerning this article, which SF MOS does "ASSASSIN" fall under??? And how many of you guys have had "Assassin" training? (Did I miss an advanced course?)

18A of course, what did you think the A stood for? (watch it. . . bub. )

[ChickenMcFuggit]

All of you steely-eyed killers are secretly trained to do those things we see in the video games, killin' folks with blowdarts and such, flying around in black helicopters from area 51.

Tomorrow, to counter the negative media-induced perception of 'assassin', I'm sure the PC White House will start referring to any Counter-terrorism unit as a Hostile Population Reduction Agency or some such. Getting to be as much a war with words as deeds.

[echoes]

Originally Posted by Team Sergeant

I'm betting our next Special Forces Green Beret "fake/fraud" will have "Special Forces ASSASSIN course 3-10" in his online resume.

TS Sir,

IMHO, when that happens, I can only hope Ya'll smoke the tool's sorry ass!!! Posers be Damned!!!

Holly--->Your cheering section!!!

[jbour13]

I know nothing!!

[longrange1947]

There has been complaints in the past that we teach assassination.

[Marina]

We're all PSYOP now.

US troops Won't Be Sent To Pakistan: Robert Gates

CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan — There are no plans to deploy U.S. ground troops to Pakistan, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday, despite concerns over increasing violence between Pakistani troops and Taliban militants.

Speaking to about 300 Marines at Camp Leatherneck in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, Gates assured them that they wouldn't be fighting in the neighboring sovereign nation.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/0..._n_198759.html

School bombing exposes Obama’s secret war inside Pakistan

THE discovery of three American soldiers among the dead in a suicide bombing at the opening of a girls’ school in the northwestern Pakistan town of Dir last week reignited the fears of many Pakistanis that Washington was set on invading their country.

Barack Obama has banned the Bush-era term “war on terror” and dithered about sending extra troops to Afghanistan, but across the border in Pakistan, the US president has dramatically stepped up the covert war against Islamic extremists.

US airstrikes in Pakistan, launched from unmanned drones, are now averaging three a week, triple the number last year. “We're quietly seeing a geographical shift,” an intelligence officer said.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle7017929.ece

Pak urged to acknowledge role in drone strikes

Further stressing the point, [Levin] claimed that Pakistani leaders “not only understand and acquiesce, but in many cases privately support the drone attacks”. The minimum the United States should expect from Pakistan “is a silence on their part rather than a public attack on us”.

Such criticism “creates real problems for us in terms of the Pakistani public and helps create some real animosity towards us — a sense of revenge, the implication that we’re violating Pakistan’s sovereignty”, he said.Senator Levin said he believed it was wrong to put all the blame on the US and “I’ve told them that to their face”.

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/...-strikes-hs-04

General McChrystal says we shouldn't believe him

If today's New York Times was reporting accurately, you should be very skeptical of anything that Afghan commander General Stanley McChrystal says. Not because he's inherently dishonest, mind you, but because misleading everyone about the situation in Afghanistan may be part of his strategy for victory.

To be specific, today's Times also contains an article with the headline "Top U.S. Commander Sees Progress in Afghanistan." It quotes McChrystal as follows: "I am not prepared to say that we have turned the corner. So I'm saying the situation is serious, but I think we have made significant progress in setting the conditions in 2009, and beginning some progress, and that we'll make real progress in 2010."

This is nicely hedged, but McChrystal went to describe the war in a way that leads me to question virtually anything he might have to say now or in the future. According to the Times, the general also said that "The biggest thing is in convincing the Afghan people ... This is all a war of perceptions. This is not a physical war in terms of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants".

On the one hand this statement is something of a truism, in the sense that resolve, morale, and expectations about the future can be critical factors (though what is actually happening on the battlefield is hardly irrelevant). But McChrystal's statement invites us to doubt anything he might choose to tell us about the progress of the war either now or in the months to come. Why? Because if he believes it is "all a war of perceptions," then spinning the war in the most favorable possible light has to be part of his strategy, in order to try to persuade both Afghans and Americans that we are winning. And that means we can't accept anything he says at face value, because we can't know if he's giving us an honest appraisal or just deploying a lot of blue smoke and mirrors in order to influence perceptions (which he thinks are key).

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/...nt_believe_him

[TOMAHAWK9521]

Originally Posted by wet dog

Not unless you missed the part where you were taught the technique of bashing a head in with an E-tool.

But watching the entire 32 movies of James Bond weighs equally to an online correspondence course.

Hey, I remember "First Blood" when Rambo goes off about being able to drive a tank and fly a gunship but he couldn't hold a regular job. He probably couldn't hold a job because he kept assassinating his boss and co-workers.