EPA/Focke Strangmann
German soldiers (Photo: Archive)
The Taliban are still making progress. Now they have conquered Kandahar, the second largest city in Afghanistan. Veterans of the German Bundeswehr from Afghanistan say that they feel “extremely shitty” because of what is happening in that country.
New, worse news is constantly arriving from Afghanistan: the Taliban have also conquered Kandahar, a city of half a million inhabitants in the south of the country. But an even bigger shock for German veterans was the fall of Kunduz and practically the entire north of Afghanistan, which was initially considered a “peaceful area”.
– For veterans, this caused an emotional shock – says Wolf Gregis, a former soldier who is now a book author and professor of pedagogy in Rostock. This is especially true of Kunduz: “No other place in Afghanistan is so closely associated with fallen German soldiers.”
It was in the province of Kunduz that German soldiers suffered the most losses. Events that practically marked the German public’s understanding of the war in Afghanistan also took place there.
– There, German soldiers learned for the first time, in great style, what fighting is and what dying in an “asymmetric war” is. And what a horror it is – says Gregis.
The bloodiest year of the Bundeswehr
At the beginning of the mission of the German army in Kunduz, that region was considered one of the safest in Afghanistan. There, in 2003, Germany took command of the country’s Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT), as it is called in NATO jargon. But already in June of that year, four German soldiers were killed in an attack on a bus, and since 2006, the fighting has become more intense. Gregis says that Kunduz “tested the meaning of the German mission in Afghanistan”.
The province was the scene of several horrific events: in September 2009, a German officer ordered an air attack on a tanker truck that got stuck on the road. But a crowd of civilians gathered around the truck and more than a hundred were killed. Of course, the German officer did not intend that.
A year later, German troops increasingly engaged in battles with the Taliban. The so-called “Battle of Good Friday” in April 2010, when a German patrol was ambushed, is still remembered. The fight lasted for nine hours, three German soldiers were killed and eight were wounded. In the end, they were saved by the air support of the American helicopter.
Thus began, as the German army calls it, “the bloodiest year in history” of the Bundeswehr. They remained in that position until 2013, when they were moved to a camp near Mazar and Sharif, west of Kunduz.
In almost two decades of the German army mission in Afghanistan, a total of 59 German soldiers were killed.
“Everything could have been predicted, the whole catastrophe”
Now German veterans are watching the Taliban simply overrun the capital of the province in which they were. For many, it caused shock and anger.
“I feel extremely shitty,” says Johannes Claire, a former Bundeswehr non-commissioned officer who also wrote a book about his missions in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011. “We left our blood, sweat and tears there.” Our comrades were killed there. “Everything could have been foreseen, and no later than after 2014, when the combat units were withdrawn and when it became clear that the Afghan forces were not able to cope with the situation on their own.”
Was it in vain?
“Leaving in the lurch” hurts German veterans, among other things, because they are convinced that “Afghans loved Germans more than American soldiers.”
The Bundeswehr stronghold in Kunduz in 2013 was handed over to the Afghan government. German units withdrew to their new command post in Mazar and Sharif in the west of the country, and at the end of June this year, the last German soldier left Afghanistan.
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