Paris - A carefully executed ambush by about 100 Afghan Taliban insurgents on Aug. 18 left 10 French paratroopers dead and 21 wounded, the French government said.
President Nicolas Sarkozy said in an Aug. 19 statement he was flying to Afghanistan the same evening to show the French forces that "France is at their side."
Morale in the French military has sunk recently as the government unveiled base closures and job cuts of 54,000 over the next few years to save money for equipment modernization.
The losses were the heaviest in a single engagement for the French Army since a bombing in Beirut in the early 1980s that killed more than 50 soldiers, a spokesman for the chief of staff said.
The clash occurred in the late afternoon as a joint patrol of French troops, Afghan National Army, and U.S. special operations forces conducted a reconnaissance and intelligence mission, Defense Minister Hervé Morin told a hastily convened news conference.
The American special operations forces consisted of a joint terminal attack controller element. Three Afghan soldiers were wounded; there were no deaths among American or Afghan forces.
French forces have conducted this type of reconnaissance mission every day, operating from camp Surobi - formerly known as forward operating base Hawkeye - since France took up in August the rotating command of the regional center at Kabul, Morin said. Command of the regional center includes the Surobi district 50 kilometers east of the capital.
The Surobi district is not part of the new French deployment of 700 combat troops in the east under U.S. command, announced by Sarkozy in April.
The insurgents opened fire after a lead group of French soldiers dismounted from their armored vehicles in a mountain pass at the head of the Uzbeen valley, Gen. Jean-Louis Georgelin, chief of staff of the Army, told the news conference. Nine soldiers were killed in the opening minutes of contact, with the 10th killed in a road accident as a VAB armored vehicle overturned at 05:30 on Aug. 19.
The irregular fighters showed "a capability of maneuver," successively attacking the support base and a second section of the joint patrol, which consisted of about 100 soldiers, Georgelin said.
The attack took place in an "extremely harsh environment," in heat of 30° centigrade, at an elevation of 2 kilometers in rocky, dusty conditions. A quick reaction force was sent out from Kabul and A-10 aircraft and Kiowa helicopters provided close air support.
A pair of French Caracal helicopters airlifted the dead and wounded. The rest of the patrol regrouped and broke off contact at 2 a.m. to return to camp Surobi by road, where they ran into further attack but suffered no casualties. An estimated 30 insurgents were killed and the same number wounded, Georgelin said.
One of the theories for the ambush was that the insurgents were protecting a senior Taliban official. Other possibilities were the French patrols were disturbing the Taliban presence in the valley, and that the attack was part of a rise in insurgent attacks linked to Afghanistan's independence day.
Morin and Georgelin will go with Sarkozy to Afghanistan, while the minister for veteran affairs, Jean-Marie Bockel, will visit the three bases from which the units came.
The Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program is ready to test a few components that soldiers may have in their hands by 2010.
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