Desserted Town News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Careful and very complex operation, using a lot of machinery in lieu of taking casualties. so far, thank god, only one marine killed and one british marine killed in this nato operation. >> yeah. so general, marjah, talk about the relevance here and what they hope to achieve by gaining this town? what's the point of it all? >> yeah. well, of course general stan mccrystal's overall strategy -- by the way the commander of nato forces in the south, the british two star nick carter, extremely talented officer, i got briefed by a few months ago, their point is get into this bread basket area of afg...

Brigade. so now this is the last stand, 400 to 1,000 fighters, most of them apparently have fled the area, but the marines are going to eliminate that last stronghold. >> how does nato keep the hands of -- this town out of the hands of the taliban? >> well, very deliberate planning and this is going to be the point of it in the next 30 days, we're putting around 1500 afghan policemen in there, allegedly by the end of the year there will be almost 15,000 afghan soldiers and police to re-establish government control and provide services. that's the crux of it. the marines cannot be stopped getti...

The military coming into town didn't cross the bridge, it opted to build its own temporary bridges. i'm joined by retired u.s. general barry mccaffrey, a military analyst. good morning, general. >> good morning, alex. >> so this is incredible. can you talk about the mentality? they've got to into a town they have to build their own bridges to get there? >> there's nothing more fearful than facing these mine and ieds. marines are skillful fighters as we all know. they got in the middle of the town at 2:00 in the morning by helicopter assault, bypassing all this. now they're putting in their own...

Booby traps, what kinds of things are these and why aren't the citizens there affected by this? >> they are, dramatically. the poorer civilians get caught in the middle of this. so far only seven civilians wounded, thank god. marines are being extremely careful to minimize or eliminate collateral damage. the taliban have no such compunctions. they were mining people's homes, the bridges, the roads trying to keep them from fleeing. most of the town got out of the area of the fighting. very deliberate information warfare campaign to have the civilians leave the area before the u.s. and afghan fo...

Amount of bombs and ieds they've found. also, you have a number of sniper positions, freshly abandoned and that have been booby-trapped again and ready to go for american soldiers going in. they're finding the town is a desserted town. everyone has obviously fleed the place in, you know, in expectation of the mass force coming in from nato. what we've also found is that certain nato saying they have taken over most positions and most of marjah but what they've found early this morning is when nato was putting a flag up in a position they've secured, they came under some small arms fire which a...