Another brave Canadian pays the ultimate price...Trooper Brian Richard Good, 42, of the Royal Canadian Dragoons, was killed this morning when a bomb exploded near his armoured vehicle in the Shah Wali Kowt District, about 35 kilometres north of Kandahar City.And like their counterparts in Gaza and the West Bank... these guys don't really care who gets that one way ticket to the afterlife.
Trooper Good, the father of two young daughters, is the 10th Canadian soldier in Afghanistan to die in the past five weeks; all of them felled by roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which insurgents have planted in culverts and ditches along the main highways west and north of Kandahar City.
For insurgents, the use of IEDs is effective because the roadside bombs exact maximum damage for minimal cost and manpower. Col. Cade predicted that the use of roadside bombs will eventually backfire against the Taliban.**********
“They are not winning any friends with the locals through the use of IEDS, because it's not just coalition forces that are threatened by IEDs,” he said. “It's the people themselves. And innocent people are being killed by IEDs throughout Afghanistan. It is not a form of warfare that is going to win for them.”
RELATED: Sure... let's play by "HAMAS rules"
The Israeli Defense Forces said that their troops had fired several mortar shells near the school in response to mortar fire from the school compound.*
“They shot back to save their own lives,” said Ilan Tal, an Israeli military spokesman and a brigadier general in the reserves. Among the dead, the military said in a statement, were “Hamas terrorist operatives and a mortar battery cell.”
The military identified two Hamas operatives, Imad Abu Asker and Hassan Abu Asker, as having been killed.
A young witness from Jabaliya, Ibrahim Amen, 16, said that he had seen one of the militants, whom he identified as Abu Khaled Abu Asker, in the area of the school right before the attack.
Ibrahim said he saw the militant after he answered calls for volunteers to pile sand around the camp “to help protect the resistance fighters.” Ibrahim went to pile sand near the school with his brother, Iyad, 20, who was then injured by the Israeli mortar fire.