It's the Taliban calling
Updated on 01 February 2008
The Taliban have taken to calling up the marines in Sangin - "why don't you come up here and attack us properly?" They ask.
We've now moved on to Sangin - in the Helmand Valley still - to a company of Marines based here.
The Talliban are all around town basically so far as I can work out and regularly harrass the locals and Marines alike with various forms of roadside bombs and other methods of delivering high explosive.
Every now and then the Marines, it seems, move into their territory and they all have a big fight, or a small fight, or just a fight fight. Then it stops for a while. Then it starts up all over again.
In the interludes the Taliban have taken to calling up. As one Marine remarked to me today, it's a bit like the British and Germans on the Western Front in the First World War.
One of them was this morning. Lots of banter about why don't you come up here and attack us properly and what's wrong with you lot of infidels - that kind of thing.
The translator took it all very cooly and related all of it to the Intelligence officer sitting in on the morning call.
He thought it best to let the Taliban commander know that he could always turn himself in and avoid having to be killed or forced out of the area altogether. The Marine's view is that this is the choice faced by the Taliban. Since he did not take up the request it was hard to tell whether he accepted that this is, in fact, the choice he and his fighters face in the oncoming days and weeks.
Apparently the Taliban do this kind of thing on a regular basis. The translator who took the call asked the Taliban about some very obvious point of religious significance in Islam - he said the caller didn't have a clue as to what he was talking about.
Nonetheless there was plenty of stuff coming down through the mobile handset about Jihad and the holy struggle and so forth.
Well, that was this morning. It's now late into the freezing night and I can scarcely type any more it's so cold. But out at the main gate of this base there's no sign yet that our breakfast caller has taken up the chance to swop sides in this long war.
