Afghanistan timeline March 16-31, 2003
Nation-building in Afghanistan
- Thailand’s government, working with the Asian Foundation for Wheelchair Users and the Thai Foundation for the Disabled, sent 100 wheelchairs to the people of Afghanistan.
- The International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Afghan Ministry for Refugees and Repatriation began a joint registration exercise in the northern provinces Takhar, Jowzjan, Sar-e Pol, Faryab, Balkh, Samangan, Baghlan, Konduz and Badakhshan. An estimated 45,000 internally displaced persons were to be registered by 76 registration teams.
- BearingPoint announced it had been awarded a three-year, $39.9 million contract from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to help Afghanistan implement policy and institutional reform measures that will lead to an improved environment for economic development. The agreement includes an option for another two years, for a total award of $64.1 million.
- U.S. soldiers near Jalalabad, Afghanistan found a cache of 800 BM-12 rockets.
- The Afghan government trained 20 finance officers to ensure revenues across the country were collected transparently. The officers completed one-month training courses sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development and the World Bank.
- Japan donated about US$20 million to Afghanistan. One source claimed the money was meant to help rebuild its transportation infrastructure, including buying new ambulances and buses. The Japan Times claimed the money was meant to create jobs, to promote education, and to create a constitution.
- In Afghanistan, a group of U.S.-led forces (dubbed Task Force Devil) participating in Operation Valiant Strike captured four suspected rebels and seizing a major weapons cache. The cache included electronic detonators, timers, dozens of mortar and rocket-propelled grenade rounds and land mines.
- In Jalalabad, more than 2,000 university students protesting the U.S.-led war on Iraq clashed with the security forces. Seven students were lightly injured. The confrontation began when students tried to remove barricades set up to prevent them from blocking the main Jalalabad-Kabul highway. Some students threw stones on two vehicles carrying U.S. special forces on the highway.
- A rocket was fired toward the coalition-controlled airport in Khost, Afghanistan.
- Three rockets were fired near a U.S. base in Gardez, Afghanistan in the eastern province of Paktia and 11 were fired at another base in the province, near the Pakistan border.
- Around 20 Canadian troops left for Afghanistan to pave the way for Canadian troops to join the U.N. peacekeeping force ISAF.
- The Perini Corporation was awarded a contract by the United States Army Corps of Engineers for the design and construction of facilities to support the First Brigade of the Afghan National Army, located near Kabul.
- About 400 gunmen attacked a checkpoint in Tora Shaikh in the northwestern province of Badghis, Afghanistan near the border with Turkmenistan. Seven attackers and six government soldiers were killed.
- A patrol of U.S. forces from the Shkin base in the Paktika province of Afghanistan came under gunfire and grenade attack by as many as five militants. There were no injuries. A Humvee, containing three soldiers, was damaged after tumbling into a ditch to evade the fire. A grenade landed underneath the vehicle, but did not detonate.
- In Afghanistan, U.S.-led forces participating in Operation Valiant Strike found more than 170 rocket-propelled grenades and scores of land mines and mortar rounds.
- Afghanistan marked World Tuberculosis Day with a ceremony in Kabul. To date, Afghanistan had one of the highest incidences of the disease in the world, killing 23,000 a year. The disease was mainly the result of poverty and malnutrition.
- On a train between the Belorussian capital Minsk and Moscow, Maj. Gen. Viktor Karpukhin died of heart failure. Karpukhin had been a commander of an elite Soviet commando unit that took part in one of the riskier operations of the Soviet Union's 10-year war in Afghanistan.
- A U.S. Air Force HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter crashed while on a on a medical evacuation mission in Afghanistan, killing all six people on board. The accident occured about 18 miles north of Ghazni. The accident brought the number of US military personnel killed in Afghanistan to almost 60, more than half of whom died in noncombat operations.
- About 30 new prisoners were taken to Camp X-Ray in Cuba, bringing to about 660 the number of inmates there.
- About 1,000 people in Mehtar Lam, Afghanistan demonstrated against the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
- In Sato Kandow, Afghanistan, U.S. Special Forces, patrolling a stretch of road from Gardez to Khost, clashed with militiamen loyal to Bacha Khan Zardran, prompting the special forces to call in Apache helicopter gunships. Up to 10 rebels were killed and seven were wounded.
- A mediation team, consisting of United Nations officials and military officials from key northern factions, was dispatched to Latti, Afghanistan to stem fighting between Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta Mohammed.
- A large weapons cache was found inside several buildings in a walled compound near the southern Sami Ghar mountains, Afghanistan, where hundreds of U.S.-led troops were hunting for terror suspects as part of Operation Valiant Strike. Two suspected rebels were captured. The cache included 170 107mm rockets, two 82mm mortars and 400 mortar rounds, two heavy machine guns, two antiaircraft cannons, thousands of rocket-propelled grenades with eight launchers, and thousands of machine gun rounds.
- In the Wath army post, about 20 miles south of Spinboldak, attackers opened fire, killing three Afghan soldiers.
- Three Afghan soldiers were killed and four kidnapped in two separate pre-dawn attacks on security checkposts near Spin Boldak.
- Afghan President Hamid Karzai arrived in Pakistan for a four-day visit with Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali.
- The school year in most of Afghanistan officially started, but schools were closed because of a holiday for the Afghan New Year. Education Minister Yunus Qanooni said 5.8 million students would go to school, up from 3.3 million the year before. The United Nations had a more conservative estimate of about 4.5 million. Many villages set up informal schools in mosque courtyards, tents and private homes because they never had schools in the first place or the buildings were destroyed.
==March 21, 2003== The Afghan New Year
- In Khost, twelve Afghan policemen were arrested and police chief Mohammad Mustafa was dismissed for alleged involvement in corruption, drug trafficking or having links with the Taliban and al-Qaida. The arrests were made by about 50 U.S. and 20 Afghan troops. About 60 police officers were believed to be involved, but when the arrests were made, several fled. Mustafa was replaced by Mohammed Zaman Khan. About 800 officers remain in the force.
- A new strategy to disarm militias in Afghanistan will be given to President Hamid Karzai by a team of United Nations and Afghan government officials, when he will announce it to the nation.
- The U.S.-backed Afghan government called for a quick end to the war in Iraq, saying President Saddam Hussein should leave Iraq. The statement read: "We want the people of Iraq to be free from despotism...It is in the interest of the Iraqi people for Saddam Hussein to leave power. The interests of the people of Iraq are higher than the interests of Saddam Hussein and his family...We want a united Iraq, with a government representing its people for peace and stability in the region and world."
- By the third day of Operation Valient Strike, U.S. forces had arrested 12 people, including members of Afghanistan's former Taliban regime.
- 18 Afghan prisoners left Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to be released home.
- All U.N. offices and embassies in Afghanistan were closed amid security concerns after the U.S. initiated its war against Iraq. Domestic flights continued, but international flights into Afghanistan were canceled. In Kabul, police stopped and searched most vehicles at major intersections causing mile-long traffic tie-ups. Coalition soldiers maintained a heavy presence on Chicken Street, a popular tourist destination for Westerners.
- A bomb hidden in a drainage ditch exploded in Kandahar, Afghanistan and a second bomb was found and defused.
- U.S. Special Forces observed missile fire in Khost, Afghanistan against a border post on the nearby frontier with Pakistan. Fire was returned and close air support from an A-10 aircraft dropped several bombs on the suspected positions of the attackers. There were no US casualties or damage reports.
- Attackers fired 11 rockets toward the U.S. base in the eastern town of Orgun-E, Afghanistan, but none landed closer than 500 yards from the base.
- At Deh Rawood in the central province of Uruzgan, Afghanistan, U.S. Special Forces reported a rocket fired at an observation tower near one of their outpost.
- As part of Operation Valiant Strike, U.S. troops poured into the villages of Gari Kaloay and Sekandarzay, Afghanistan, around 140 kilometres (87 miles) east of Kandahar.
- About two-hundred U.S troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, led by a battalion of 800 known as the "White Devils," were ferried by helicopters into the Sami Ghar mountains, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Kandahar, initiating Operation Valiant Strike. The objective was to locate Osama Bin Laden and members of al Qaeda. The U.S. troops were accompanied by Romanian infantry.
- Afghan journalist Ahmed Shah Behzad, an employee of Radio Liberty, was detained and beaten by local security forces in Herat.
- More than a dozen 107 mm rockets landed near the U.S. Special Forces in Orgun (in Paktika), Afghanistan.
- Suspected Taliban fighters ambushed the Afghan government Sherabik post about 70 kilometers (40 miles) to the southwest of Kandahar, slitting the throats of three Afghan soldiers.
- Near Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, international explosives experts destroyed two weapons caches, including a dozen rockets and four homemade bombs, left behind by suspected enemy fighters. The bombs were originally found in Jalalabad in February near the home of a secretary of Din Mohammed, the governor of Nangarhar province.
- A 20-year-old Afghan militia soldier was flown from eastern Afghanistan to coalition headquarters in Bagram for medical treatment after being shot in the back and foot.
- A 12-year-old Afghan boy who stepped on a land mine was rushed to Bagram Air Base for medical treatment. The boy's left leg was amputated.
- The United States and Afghanistan asked Norway to organize and lead a border police along the Afghan border. Norway did not give an immediate reply.
- Pakistan approved transit facilities for Afghanistan, including deletion of eight items from the negative list of most controversial Afghan Transit Trade Agreement (ATTA), reduction in railways freight and new rail and road routes to facilitate the transportation of goods. The items deleted from the negative list are cotton yarn, polyester, metalised film, ball bearings, timers, tape recorders, glass ware/dinner sets, juicers/blenders and videocassette recorders.
- Australia announced it would shut down a second detention center on Christmas Island for asylum seekers just a week after it closed the doors of its controversial Woomera camp. The last four detainees were sent back to Afghanistan days earlier.
- An agreement between Pakistan, Afghanistan and the UNHCR is scheduled to be signed in Geneva the repatriation of 600,000 Afghan refugees from Pakistan.
- The Italian Camp Salerno outside Khost, Afghanistan came under rocket-fire and gun-fire. Italian soldiers returned fire at the unidentified attackers, wounding at least one before the assailants fled.
- In Afghanistan, gunmen used rockets and machine guns to attack U.S. Special Forces at a separate base about six kilometers (four miles) from Italy's Camp Salerno.
- Brigadier Ashfaq-ur-Rasheed Khan of Pakistan's Anti-Narcotics Force forcast that Afghanistan was heading for a record opium poppy crop in the coming summer.
- A bomb exploded on the roof of the home of Malik Mohammed Nazeer, the senior bureaucrat in the government of Nangarhar province, Afghanistan. Three other bombs were found, but did not detonate. No one was injured.
- Afghanistan's government signed a repatriation agreement in The Hague with the Netherlands, which at the time hosted about 40,000 Afghan refugees.
- Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai told a meeting in Brussels he feared that a possible U.S.-led war against Iraq could make donors shift their focus from Afghanistan, with future aid for the country going instead toward helping rebuild Iraq.
- The Wheat Disposal Committee announced that Pakistan Agricultural Supplies and Storages Corporation (PASSCO) would export around 300,000 tons of wheat to Afghanistan and Bangladesh.
- In Brussels, the European Union pledged 400 million euro (US$432 million) in financial aid to rebuild Afghanistan until the end of 2004. Canada pledged $250 million to Afghanistan for the same time frame.
- The U.S. Trade Development Agency on granted $280,081 to Afghanistan's government to study a proposed national high-speed telecommunications backbone. To date, one out of 625 Afghan citizens had access to telephone services.
- International explosive ordinance teams near Kandahar, Afghanistan destroyed a weapons cache that included more than 4,000 mortar rounds, 500 artillery projectiles and about 6 million rounds of machine gun ammunition.
- In Gardez, a 6-year-old Afghan boy attempted to stab a U.S. soldier with a syringe containing an unidentified liquid, but the needle was blocked by his protective vest. The boy fled the scene.
- Afghanistan signed a tripartite agreement with Pakistan and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees calling assistance in the voluntary return of Afghan refugees.
- Afghanistan granted the release of all Pakistani prisoners (almost 1,000) held in its jails. No date was given for the release of the prisoners, mainly held in Sherberghan. Less than a week later, the number of prisoners to be released was reduced to 72.
- A U.S. armored Humvee was hit by debris from an explosive device near the Afghan city of Kandahar. No one was injured.
- In Afghanistan, forces loyal to Uzbek warlord Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum clashed with those of his Tajik rival, Gen. Atta Mohammed in Latti village in Sar-e-Pol province. Five of Dostum's commanders were captured and one soldier was injured. Retreating soldiers loyal to Dostum stole 250 sheep.