TAPS Program - Support for families of fallen soldiers

Mentors support families of fallen soldiersBy Renee Chou
WRAL.com
August 21, 2010

Coping with a soldier's death can be a lonesome and difficult journey. But survivors of fallen soldiers don't have to go through it alone.

The Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS) offers peer mentor training to help survivors grieving a military loss.

Randy and Betsy Beard learned about TAPS after their 22-year-old son was killed in 2004 in Ramadi, Iraq.“He took shrapnel in the head and died about three hours later,” Randy Beard said.

Brad Beard was an Army mechanic who worked on howitzers. He was stationed in Korea for two years and volunteered to go to Iraq when he heard the Army needed mechanics.
“When someone really close to you dies, it just shatters your whole world,” Betsy Beard said.

“My heart was ripped apart,” Randy Beard said. “You are helpless. You can't help your wife. You can't help your family. There is nothing you can do to make it better.”

Overwhelmed with grief, the Beards contacted TAPS for help. A program mentor reached out to Betsy Beard by telephone.“She was a mom like me who lost a son in the military. She lived in Vermont,” Betsy Beard said. “I knew if she could survive, I could survive as well.”

The Beards are taking part this weekend in a TAPS camp in Pinehurst where about 150 people are learning how to survive military loss.“We are here to reach out our hand to those walking behind us,” Randy Beard said. “What that does for grief is that it helps us feel not so isolated,” Betsy Beard said.

The support is crucial because the Beards say they have learned that time does not heal the pain.“Time just moves on. What we do with our time can help or hinder us I think,” Randy Beard said.

The Beards, who live in Louisburg, travel to Fort Hood, Fort Campbell and Fort Lewis to provide peer mentoring. They also run a monthly support group for military families dealing with loss in Raleigh.

Somalia resembling Afghanistan under Taliban

Somalia resembling Afghanistan under Taliban
Some experts say the similarities are no accident

Associated Press

By JASON STRAZIUSO, MOHAMED OLAD HASSAN
updated 8/22/2010 12:00:09 AM

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Men are forced to grow beards. Women can't leave home without a male relative. Music, movies and watching sports on TV are banned. Limbs are chopped off as punishment, and executions by stoning have become a public spectacle.

Somalia is looking more and more like Afghanistan under the Taliban — two rugged countries 2,000 miles apart, each lacking a central government, each with a hard-line Islamist militia that cows the public into submission.

Al-Shabab in Somalia and the Taliban in Afghanistan — their tactics increasingly mirror each other. Those tactics worked for the Taliban until the U.S. invasion overthrew it in 2001, and now they are making a comeback. Meanwhile, al-Shabab has gained control over large swaths of this arid Horn of Africa country.

In the latest adoption of tactics long used by the Afghan militants, al-Shabab is ordering households in southern Somalia to contribute a boy to the militants' ranks. Childless families have to pay al-Shabab $50 a month. That's Somalia's per capita income.

An al-Shabab commander attributed the shared tactics and ideology to the fact that both groups follow a strict form of Islam.

"One more thing we deeply share is the hatred of infidels," the commander, Abu Dayib, told The Associated Press.

Some experts say the similarities are no accident.

"Al-Shabab is copying exactly whatever the Taliban was doing in the late 1990s, because they think the strategies the Taliban employed in Afghanistan were successful," said Vahid Mujdeh, the Afghan author of a book on the Taliban. "There is no doubt that the Taliban are like heroes for al-Shabab."

U.S. and other security officials worry about another common thread: Both the Taliban and al-Shabab have links to al-Qaida.

'Unrelenting oppression'
Until their overthrow, the Taliban gave Osama bin Laden and his group safe haven in Afghanistan. Many analysts believe al-Shabab is now controlled by al-Qaida-linked foreign fighters who honed their skills in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last month Al-Shabab claimed its first international attack — twin bombings in Uganda that killed 76 people watching the World Cup final on TV. Uganda said at least one of the confessed participants belonged to al-Qaida. Simultaneous attacks are an al-Qaida hallmark.

Both the Taliban and al-Shabab moved into a power vacuum left by inconclusive civil war, and were initially welcomed by publics desperate for some form of law and order. What they got was an extremely harsh penal code.

Now the Taliban is gaining ground despite NATO forces' efforts to push them back, and brazenly advertised its clout this month by stoning a young couple stoned to death in front of a crowd, allegedly for committing adultery.

In Somalia, two months ago, al-Shabab accused Ahmed Ali Shuke, a 27-year-old laborer, of being a government spy and slashed his tongue.

"Both groups derive support from followers of their strict interpretations of Shariah (Muslim law). Both groups also derive support by terrorizing the population," said Letta Tayler, a counterterrorism specialist at Human Rights Watch. "The people of Somalia, as in Afghanistan, have learned the hard way that if they speak out against these groups' practices, they will get killed."

Both the Taliban and al-Shabab win some sympathy by positioning themselves as defenders against invading infidels. Foreign forces — African Union troops in Somalia, U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan — feed into that narrative when they kill civilians during raids, Tayler said.

"Even many Somalis who don't like the Shabab's ideology are immensely thankful for the drop in crime in many areas under the group's control. Their daughters are not raped. Their crops are not stolen en route to market," she said.

But Human Rights Watch said in an April report that the stability was achieved by "unrelenting repression and brutality."

Several women told Human Rights Watch that they had been flogged or jailed for selling tea to support their families because the work brought them into contact with men.

Losing the hearts and minds'
Somalia has had no functioning government since 1991, and militants with guns have been filling the void ever since. Al-Shabab, which the U.S. branded a terror group in 2008, is believed to have several thousand members.

Hundreds of its fighters have died in battle, forcing al-Shabab to increase recruiting among young men and boys, said Ali Mohammed, a retired Somali colonel.

They are "losing the hearts and minds of the ordinary people," he said.

In turn, families in militant-controlled areas of Somalia who can afford it to send their sons away, several parents told the AP.

"I have lost one of my sons in a battle he was forced to join in central Somalia three months ago. He was only 15," said Asha Mohamed Amin, who lives in a rebel-controlled area of Mogadishu, the capital. "Again they say contribute the other son to a senseless death. Is that acceptable?"

Amin said she sent her other son to Hargeisa in northern Somalia to live with friends.

Innocent victims
A 26-year-old woman named Ubah felt al-Shabab's brutality firsthand.

She was visiting a moneychanger in the southern town of Kismayo with a male cousin when two young militants accused them of engaging in an illicit relationship after they couldn't show proof they were related. Hours later the militants whipped Ubah and her cousin — 80 lashes for the man and 50 for Ubah.

"I was crying and I thought they would never release me," Ubah told AP, asking that her last name not be used for fear of militant reprisals. "I couldn't move because there were men with guns."

She said the militants warned that if the two were seen together again they would be stoned to death.

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Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

"Probably Needed?" Mullin-McChrystal need to be blunt on what is needed

Mullen: More Troops 'Probably' Needed
Joint Chiefs Chairman Testifies Before Senate Panel as Afghanistan Debate Grows
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post
September 16, 2009

The nation's top military officer told Congress on Tuesday that the U.S. war in Afghanistan "probably needs more forces" and sought to reassure lawmakers skeptical of sending additional troops that commanders were devising new tactics that would lead to victory over a resurgent Taliban.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that 2,000 to 4,000 additional military trainers from the United States and its NATO partners will be needed to "jump-start" the expansion of Afghan security forces and strongly suggested that more U.S. combat troops will be required to provide security in the short term. "A properly resourced counterinsurgency probably needs more forces," Mullen said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Mullen spoke amid a growing political debate over Afghanistan as President Obama weighs a recently completed assessment of the war by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander there. Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, argued strenuously Tuesday against the deployment of any more U.S. combat forces, while Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the ranking Republican, said a delay in sending more combat forces would "repeat the nearly catastrophic mistakes" that occurred in Iraq before the ! Bush administration increased troop levels.

Pentagon spokesman G eoff Morrell said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates remains undecided on whether more troops are needed. Morrell played down the possibility of disagreement between the Pentagon's civilian leadership and the uniformed forces, saying that Gates "clearly has a great deal of respect for Admiral Mullen," who was seeking Senate confirmation for a second term as chairman, after Gates's recommendation to Obama. But Gates, Morrell said, "is still more in the evolution process in his thinking than having arrived at a decision as to whether or not, yes, significant numbers of additional forces are needed."

Gates and Mullen are participating in high-level administration discussions of the way forward in Afghanistan, based on recommendations from McChrystal for how to implement the strategy Obama announced in March. Since then, the number of Taliban attacks and U.S. casualties have risen to their highest rates in the eight-year-old war.

With public anxiety rising, many Democratic lawmakers are awaiting a decision by the president, and a White House strategy to sell it.

"I want to hear from the president, and not just on combat troops," Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) said in an interview. "Combat troops is like the public option" in health care, he said, quoting a conversation with Levin this month when they traveled together to Afghanistan. "Everybody can understand combat troops."

For most Americans, Kaufman said, eight years "is an eternity, and now they come in asking for another batch of troops? What's that all about? This is a crescendo growing. At some point in the not-too-distant future, [Obama] has got to do this. The clock is ticking."

Lawmakers have asked to have McChrystal testify before Congress, but Morrell said Gates does not think it would be the right time.

Obama has ordered an additional 17,000 U.S. combat troops and 4,000 trainers to Afghanistan this year, which will bring the total number of American service members in the country to 68,000 by the end of the year.

Mullen told the Senate panel he did not know what ratio of combat to training forces would be needed. He estimated that NATO contributions would not be large and that it will take two to three years to produce a sufficient number of Afghan soldiers and police.

Morrell, the Pentagon spokesman, said the distinction between trainers and combat forces is sometimes blurry. "As we learned in Iraq, our best training is done not in some sterile environment behind the wire, but rather out amongst the population, operating shoulder to shoulder with our Iraqi or Afghan counterparts. And that often leads to combat situations."

Gates "believes that we have to provide more counter-IED capabilities to our forces in Afghanistan as soon as possible," Morrell said, using the abbreviation for improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb. "By that, I mean route clearance teams, explosive ordnance disposal teams, medevac teams, intelligence assets, not to mention the hardware that's required."

Mullen emphasized that the key elements of Obama's strategy are being put into place, citing a new program to offer incentives to persuade low- and mid-level Taliban fighters to abandon the insurgency. The goal would be to win over rank-and-file Taliban fighters and then target the leaders with more lethal means, officials said.

"There's a very big opportunity here to reduce violence by reaching out to some of the lower-level guys, to give them an opportunity to see a life that's better than fighting for the Taliban," said a senior official at the NATO command in Kabul who discussed the program on the condition of anonymity. "What's really important is to get a feel for where the Afghans are" on reintegration, the official said.

No decisions have been made on what the incentives would be, although the official said they could include cash and jobs.

The major challenge is to develop a program the Afghan government accepts and imple ments from the start -in contrast to Iraq, where the United States paid former fighters and then struggled to persuade the Iraqi government to integrate them into its security forces and other jobs, the senior official said. "It has to be owned and driven by them."

Retired British Lt. Gen. Graeme Lamb, who worked on the reconciliation of fighters in Iraq, is in Afghanistan heading the initiative for McChrystal, Mullen said, although he stressed that the planning is still in the early phases. "We're not very far down that road," he said.

Mullen said he and other senior military leaders -including McChrystal; Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command; and the chiefs of military services - believe that executing Obama's strategy in Afghanistan will require not just killing insurgents but succeeding in a wide-ranging campaign to provide security, government services and economic rebuilding for the Afghan population.

"The president has given us a clear mission: disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda and its extremist allies and prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven again. You can't do that from offshore, and you can't do that by just killing the bad guys. You have to be there, where the people are when they need you there, and until they can provide for their own security. This is General McChrystal's view, and it is my view -- and that of General Petraeus and the Joint Chiefs," Mullen said in his opening remarks.

McChrystal is "alarmed by the insurgency" in Afghanistan, Mullen said, and "needs to retake the initiative from the insurgents, who have grabbed it over the last three years." Mullen said he spoke with McChrystal on Monday. "Quite honestly, he found conditions on the ground tougher than he had thought," Mullen said. (but he's Special Ops, isn't he supposed to know this stuff??)

Warned by lawmakers that U.S. public support for the war was waning, Mullen said he understood that urgent action was needed. "I worry a great deal that the clock is moving very rapidly," he said.
"Do you understand you've got one more shot back home? Do you understand that?" asked Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.)

"Yes, sir," Mullen replied.

Al-Qaeda - Somalian leader killed by US

Somali rebels slam U.S. killing of al Qaeda suspect

Tue Sep 15, 2009 7:34am EDT

MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Somalia's al Shabaab insurgents denounced a U.S. commando raid that killed one of east Africa's most wanted al Qaeda suspects and vowed Tuesday to continue their fight against Western nations.

U.S. special forces in helicopters struck a car in rebel-held southern Somalia Monday, killing the Kenyan said to have built the truck bomb that claimed 15 lives at an Israeli-owned beach hotel on the Kenyan coast in 2002.

Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, 28, was also accused of involvement in a simultaneous, but botched, missile attack on a Israeli airliner packed with tourists as it left nearby Mombasa.

Several senior Somali government sources said he had been killed along with four other foreign members of al Shabaab, which Washington describes as al Qaeda's proxy in Somalia.

The rebel group responded angrily to his death."
Al Shabaab will continue targeting Western countries, especially America ... we are killing them and they are hunting us," an al Shabaab spokesman, Sheikh Bare Mohamed Farah Khoje, told Reuters by telephone from the southern region of Gedo.

"We wish we could eradicate them all. We will never forget our brothers who were targeted illegally by the United States."

The attack marked an apparent change in tactics for the U.S. military, which has previously targeted wanted militants in Somalia using missiles, as opposed to helicopter-borne troops.

Western security agencies say the failed Horn of Africa state has become a safe haven for militants, including foreigners, who use it to plot attacks in the region and beyond.

REBEL FOES HAIL RAID

A moderate Somali militia that has been battling al Shabaab praised the U.S. raid and called late Monday for more strikes to wipe out foreign jihadists hiding out in Somalia.

"We are very pleased with the helicopters that killed the foreign al Shabaab fighters," Sheikh Abdullahi Sheikh Abu Yussuf, the spokesman for Ahlu Sunna Waljamaca, told Reuters.

"God sent birds against those who attacked the Holy Mosque, the Ka'ba, millennia ago. The same way, God has sent bombers against al Shabaab. We hope more aircraft will destroy the rest of al Shabaab, who have abused Islam and massacred Somalis."

Ahlu Sunna has fought al Shabaab for months across Somalia's central and southern regions. It is allied with the U.N.-backed government of President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, which controls just parts of the central region and some of Mogadishu.

Nahban was killed near Roobow village in Barawe District, 250 km (150 miles) south of the capital.

A U.S. official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, said U.S. special forces aboard two helicopters that flew from a U.S. Navy ship opened fired on a vehicle that they believed contained Nabhan. They then took the body into custody, the official said, and were confident it was Nabhan.

The U.S. military has launched several airstrikes inside Somalia in the past against individuals blamed for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

In May last year, U.S. warplanes killed the then-leader of al Shabaab and al Qaeda's top man in the country, Afghan-trained Aden Hashi Ayro, in an attack on the central town of Dusamareb.

Violence has killed more than 18,000 Somalis since the start of 2007 and driven another 1.5 million from their homes.

That has triggered one of the world's worst aid emergencies, with the number of people needing help leaping 17.5 percent in a year to 3.76 million, or half the population.