KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — For weeks now, the men in black turbans have been coming. They travel in pairs or small groups, on battered motorbikes or in dusty pickups, materializing out of the desert with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers slung from their shoulders.
With the advent of warmer weather, villagers say, Taliban fighters are filtering back from their winter shelters in Pakistan, ensconcing themselves across Afghanistan’s wind-swept south.
“Every day we see more and more of them,” said Abdul Karim, a farmer who already had sent his family away for safety.
The insurgents aren’t the only ones readying for battle.
At the country’s main NATO base outside Kandahar, nearly 2,300 U.S. Marines have arrived over the past two months, their presence heralded by the thunder of transport aircraft and the springing up of a tent city built on a newly cleared minefield.
The Marine force’s final elements arrived days ago and began fanning out into the field to bolster British, Canadian and Dutch troops who until now have been bearing the brunt of fighting in Afghanistan’s south, considered the conflict’s strategic center.
The conflict in Afghanistan dominated discussions at last month’s NATO summit, where President Bush pledged to send more troops and pointedly urged allies to do likewise. Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates heard urgent appeals for reinforcements from U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, who forecast a substantial surge in fighting.
The first-time arrival in Afghanistan’s south of a large force of Marines, the 24th Expeditionary Unit based in Camp Lejeune, N.C., has provided what commanders say is a much-needed infusion of firepower. The Marines have doubled the coalition’s air capacity; rows of Harrier jump jets, lumbering cargo planes and combat helicopters line the freshly laid tarmac.
Just as important, commanders say, the Marines’ deployment might give NATO-led troops the muscle and reach to choke off the flow of Taliban fighters and weaponry into neighboring Helmand province, consistently the most violence-racked in Afghanistan. It is the country’s epicenter of opium production and narco-trafficking, whose profits help fuel the insurgency.
Allied commanders express satisfaction with the battlefield edge the Marines will bring.
“We have heard all about these Americans, and we are waiting — let them come,” said a local Taliban field commander, reached by telephone. “They will learn what others before them have learned.”
Beaten badly in previous large-scale frontal assaults on NATO-led troops, Taliban fighters vow to plague them with more powerful and sophisticated roadside bombs, suicide attacks and methodical targeting of Afghans who are helping coalition forces.
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