"Iwo Jima moment" as flag flies in Afghan valley

By Peter Graff

KHAN NESHIN, Afghanistan (Reuters) - U.S. Marines brought Afghan officials to raise the Afghan flag over a formerly Taliban-held valley on Wednesday in a gesture their commander likened to a great victory of World War Two.

A newly deployed force of 10,000 Marines seized the lower Helmand River valley last week in one of the biggest operations of the Afghan war, achieving in hours what overstretched NATO troops had failed to achieve in years of fighting.

On Wednesday, they brought Helmand province governor Gulab Mangal to hoist a flag over the ruins of a 300-year-old fort in Khan Neshin, a district on the southern stretch of the river that had seen no presence of the Afghan government or Western troops.

"This is the Iwo Jima moment," Brigadier General Larry Nicholson told Reuters, referring to a ferocious battle against Japan in World War Two.

The governor scaled a rampart in the mud brick fort to hoist the flag above saluting Afghan troops, then went out to meet locals in the market place.

"It's been seven years since I saw a government official. Until today it was all Taliban," said Najmuddin Baluch, 40, a shepherd who had come to see the governor.

"We want everything from the government. We have nothing. There is no clinic. If someone gets sick here, they just die."

TEA AND TALKS

Governor Mangal held an hour-long shura, or council meeting, with about 100 local villagers, tea and cakes underneath a tarp to shield them from the sun at an archway inside the ruined fort.

Nicholson told the shura he was proud that not one civilian had been killed during the first week of the operation.

Later, Afghan election officials who arrived with the governor opened a registration booth and signed up the villagers to vote in next month's presidential election. The Taliban had banned registration in areas under their control.

Helmand is Afghanistan's most violent province and produces the bulk of the country's opium crop, which supplies 90 percent of the world's heroin, which in turn funds the insurgency.

Hugh Powell, the British head of a provincial reconstruction team overseeing foreign aid in the province, said that until a week ago only about half of Helmand's population was in areas under government control.

In a stroke, the Marines' Operation Strike of the Sword, combined with a simultaneous British operation, had cut the Taliban-controlled parts of the province in half, he said.

"This is visibly expanding the footprint of the government of Afghanistan in the most violent and unstable part of Afghanistan," Powell said.