Troops call it the Heart of Darkness, the spiritual home of the Taliban

US forces are taking on the insurgents in their own back yard in Zhari district, reports Ben Farmer with the 101st Airborne Division.

By Ben Farmer with 101st Airborne Division in Zhari district for the Telegraph


Relief swept the young private's face as the armoured convoy pulled off the road and moved behind the outpost's sandbags.

"Welcome what we call to the Heart of Darkness, or the Alamo," he said and spat as he made safe the turret-mounted machine gun at the end of a tense five-minute drive.

Two convoys travelling to the combat outpost in the Pashmul area of Zhari district had been attacked the previous day. The craters left in the giant sandbagged perimeter by rocket propelled grenades were clearly visibly.

American soldiers arriving in Kandahar for this summer's long-awaited operation to secure Afghanistan's second city have found a well-prepared enemy.

The Daily Telegraph was the first newspaper to accompany the influx of troops from the 101st Airborne Division into Zhari district, the home of the Taliban movement.

Coalition commanders insist the push, named Operation Hamkari or 'cooperation', is a new kind of military offensive. Its objective is governance and jobs rather than gun battles.

But it is already clear, a month after the reinforcements arrived, they will need to fight for Zhari first.

The area forms a funnel of arms, fighters and supplies from rural Kandahar and Helmand to the provincial capital.

Whoever controls Zhari, which sits astride the Highway One nationwide ring road, has a critical hold on the western approach to Kandahar city.

The district is also of historic importance to the Taliban movement, which grew up in Zhari's orchards and vineyards.

Mullah Mohammad Omar, founder of the movement, taught at a small mosque in the village of Singesar after he and other leaders fought the Soviet army in the 1980s.

His militia of religious students, or Taliban, were formed to fight the power of local warlords in 1994.

Their brand of strict Islamic law became the antidote to abusive local commanders.

Mullah Omar and 30 men were said to have hung a warlord who abducted and raped two teenage girls from the gun barrel of a tank.

The 101st Airborne Division and hundreds of Afghan soldiers arrived in May to wrest the Taliban's birthplace from the insurgency's grip.

"This is their area we are operating in," explained Lt Col Johnny Davis, commander of the division's first battalion, 502nd infantry regiment.

"It's their back yard, this is where their movement began and I am sure they have been told not to lose it."

Zhari is a focal point of President Barack Obama's surge. Several thousand American and Afghan troops have replaced a company of little more than 120 Canadians.

Their terrain is a wedge around 15 miles long and four miles wide at its thickest.

Zhari's population is hemmed in by mountains and deserts around a dense strip of irrigated vineyards and orchards which the locals call the gardens.

The Americans instead call it the 'green monster'.

Soldiers patrolling this farmland must scrabble over mud walls in 120F heat to avoid the paths seeded with homemade bombs. Visibility among the pomegranate trees is cut to a few yards.

The gardens are a patchwork of safe areas and battlegrounds, demarcated by streams, tracks and trees. Platoons can count attacks from almost any group of trees.

In the labyrinth of alleys and sun-baked mud houses in Senjaray town, foot patrols have come under grenade attack from fighters no older than boys.

Patrols have found bunkers, fighting positions and "bed down positions" where fighters can rest unobserved.

"There's no doubt that in large tracts of Zhari, you have got clear evidence that the insurgency is alive and well and has significant freedom of action," said Gen Nick Carter the British officer commanding international troops in southern Afghanistan.

"That means the population is oppressed and is not connected to the government."

The intelligence reports that the insurgents are now as corrupt and mercenary as the hated warlords, suggests an opportunity exists to import Afghan civil servants to set-up schools and clinics across the rural district.

The operation - which must also take harvest time demands into account - is set to stretch far into the autumn.

But American commanders are confident that weight of numbers not time will tilt the battle. "We have heard all the names, the Heart of Darkness and so on," said Major Matt Neumeyer "But just by sheer numbers we are going to gain more space and take it from the enemy."