As bullets from a Taliban machine gun ricocheted through the street below, an Afghan soldier wearing an “I Heart Kabul” T-shirt took a brief rest. “There has been fighting day and night.” …
As bullets from a Taliban machine gun ricocheted through the street below, an Afghan soldier wearing an “I Heart Kabul” T-shirt took a brief rest. “There has been fighting day and night.”
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff
Photographs by Jim Huylebroek
May 13, 2021
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — The war is just on the other side of this wall, a partly destroyed cinder block barricade in southern Afghanistan.
A week ago, a family lived in a house on the property. They have since fled, and their home has been converted into a fighting position held by a half-dozen soldiers, along with their spent shell casings and empty energy drink cans.
The roof terrace is pockmarked from a rocket-propelled grenade explosion, and there are holes bored out of the mud brick for machine guns and rifles to fire through.
“There has been fighting day and night,” said Cpl. Hamza, 28, an Afghan border force soldier who had been compelled into holding this position — far from any border — after the police and local militias fled.
It is the front line in a now abandoned neighborhood still within the city limits of Lashkar Gah. Bullets from a Taliban machine gun ricocheted through the street below, and the dull thud of grenades shook the large ornate mirror in the room where Corporal Hamza had gone in to briefly rest.
As commandos arrived to reinforce the position, a burst of automatic weapons fire narrowly missed the soldiers disembarking one of the armored vehicles. One
