Taliban Terrorist Watermelon Bombs

Afghanistan

The Gift That Just Keeps Giving

(Agence France-Presse)  -  Sixteen years after the beginning of the US war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are still highly active, controlling broad areas of the country and continuing to target and kill civilians, political figures and military targets. As summer gets under way, they have a new weapon at their disposal – bombs concealed in watermelons.

Photographs emerged on June 20 showing a Taliban operative assembling a bomb and inserting it into a watermelon. While there have been no reports so far of Taliban operations using watermelons to conceal explosives, such techniques have been lethally effective in the past.

The United Nations reported record numbers of civilian casualties in 2016 - 3,498 killed and 7,920 injured – nearly a third of them children. Most of the casualties were in attacks by the Taliban and other insurgent groups. Afghan security forces suffered more than 6,785 deaths in 2016.

The Taliban have been known to hide mines inside the dead bodies of Afghan soldiers, or in the bodies of dead dogs. When it comes to bombs, they use other methods in order to infiltrate protected zones and even high-security compounds. They sometimes conceal explosives in pots of cooked food or even among the pages of the Koran. They use these methods to get the explosives past the security cordon. Their operatives pretend to be a chef or domestic worker delivering an order.

The Taliban use these kind of methods only when they want to hit an important target: for example, when they want to attack an official ceremony, or a high-level meeting of government officials or military personnel. For example when they assassinated former President Burhanuddin Rabbani in 2011, the explosive device was hidden inside a suicide bomber’s turban.

Read More . . . .

British Fortifications, Kabul in 1879
From 1839 to 1919 the British fought three wars in Afghanistan with near zero real results.  But politicians and soldiers love to play war and refuse to learn the lessons of history on the limits of military power.  Now these same moronic "leaders" want to play soldier in Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Iran and Syria.
.
(Battle of Kabul 1879)

Officers of the 10th Hussars at Jellalabad - 1879
South West of Jellalabad in North Eastern Afghanistan.
See The Battle of Futtehabad.