Good Friday battle near Kunduz: Germany's black day
Reading time: 5 min.
|Even 15 years after the Battle of Isa Khel, there is still a need for clarification. Wolf Gregis soberly describes the facts of this tragic day and avoids assigning blame. This is what makes his book so valuable and unique.
Whenever German government politicians spoke about the Bundeswehr's deployment in Afghanistan , the promise was rarely missing: We are doing everything possible to protect our soldiers there. So why, then, was Maik Mutschke lying seriously injured on a meadow outside the village of Isa Khel on a Friday afternoon in April 2010, under Taliban fire and with almost no cover? The reconnaissance patrol had been ambushed. And why were other soldiers unable to get through to him and rescue the men? Because the Bundeswehr had no means of advancing towards them in Kunduz . It had no helicopters there, and certainly no attack helicopters. It also had no battle tanks and no armed drones. All of that would have looked like war. But the war that the German soldiers had to fight here on behalf of its government had, according to the will of that same government, not been allowed to be called war until then. But what happened in the infamous "Good Friday battle" was nothing else: war, raw, bloody, horrific. At the end of this most costly day of the Bundeswehr's Afghanistan mission, three soldiers were dead and several seriously injured.
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