Marines launch assault in Afghanistan
U.S. Marines in helicopters and Humvees flooded into a Taliban-held town in southern Afghanistan’s most violent province early Tuesday in the first major American operation in the region in years.
Several hundred Marines pushed into the town of Garmser in predawn light, stretching NATO’s presence into an area littered with poppy fields and classified as Taliban territory.
U.S. commanders say Taliban fighters have been expecting an assault and have been setting up improvised explosive devices in response. It wasn’t known how much resistance the Marines would face in Garmser, where the British have a small base on the town’s edge but whose main marketplace is closed because of the Taliban threat