AFGHAN soldiers serving with coalition forces were mutilated and killed by a mob that included women and children, a British officer said yesterday.

Major Dougie Mckay, second-in-command of 7 Para Royal Horse Artillery, said that the men were killed near a British base along with two French soldiers. The incident had horrifying parallels with Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Young British Soldier, written more than a century ago.

The mutilated soldiers were among Afghan forces escorting a French unit a few miles from the British base at Tangye. One French vehicle took a wrong turn and came into “heavy combat” with Taleban fighters. Two French special forces soldiers and 14 Afghan escorts were killed.

Major Mckay is part of the Operation, Mentoring and Liaison Team (OMLT) training Afghan troops. He said: “Whether they were killed by rocket-propelled grenades or small-arms fire before or after they were mutilated we may never find out. They were very badly mutilated. They had their ears, noses and genitals cut off. Women and, allegedly, children were taking part.”

After an initial attack on the French vehicle, 12 Afghan Army soldiers became stranded on a hill. They telephoned for help but before coalition forces could come to their rescue they, too, were massacred by Taleban forces.

“When we heard, no one doubted the information. It was nasty and there was silence, with people obviously thinking about their own mortality,” Major Mckay told The Times.

Tangye is in a particularly volatile area of Helmand, less than a mile north of the Sangin valley, where six British soldiers have died in recent weeks.

No British soldiers have been killed in Tangye but Captain Chris Woodward, 28, the former commanding officer of the OMLT team in the region, estimates that 93 Taleban rebels have been killed in clashes with British and Afghan forces. In the past five weeks there were only seven days when Taleban militants did not try to attack the base.

The Frenchmen, who were killed on May 20, were part of a small team of trainers with the Afghan Army in Tangye protecting the Kajaki dam project and were on their way home after completing their tour.

The training has been taken over by the British, who consider the road up the Sangin valley to the camp at Tangye too dangerous to drive. All movements are made by air.

KIPLING’S ADVICE

But the worst o’ your foes is the sun over’ead:
You must wear your ’elmet for all that is said:
If ’e finds you uncovered ’e’ll knock you down dead, An’ you'll die like a fool of a soldier.
Fool, fool, fool of a soldier

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier Go, go, go like a soldier,

The Young British Soldier Rudyard Kipling (1892)

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