Today in History-July 2, 2009

Operation Khanjar in Afghanistan

On July 2, 2009, the largest operation of the year, code named Operation Strike of the Sword (Operation Khanjar), was launched by about 4,000 U.S. marines from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade commanded by Brigadier General Larry Nicholson and 650 Afghan troops supported by NATO aircraft. The Marines were part of the first wave of 21,000 surge troops sent to Afghanistan, the Operation Khanjar was the first major offensive by some of the over 10,000 Marines which were deployed in Southern Afghanistan in early June 2009. Described as the largest Marine offensive since the Battle of Fallujah in Iraq in 2004,[1] the operation became the largest airlift offensive by the U.S. marines since Vietnam. It was spearheaded by two Marine infantry battalions and one Light Armored Reconnaissance battalion against three major towns along a 75-mile stretch of the Helmand River valley south of Lashkargah. On July 2, the column moved south from the Camp Leatherneck northwest of Lashkargah along the Helmand Valley and then branched out into three battalion columns advancing against Garmsir in the north, Nawa-i-Barakzai in the center and Khan-Neshin in the south. Faced with a major NATO offensive by overwhelming troops, the Taliban abandoned the towns in Central Helmand, letting the NATO troops clear the area in less than one week with no serious opposition. The insurgents, however, merely shifted their forces to northern Helmand or retreated across the border to Pakistan.

(from Ali A. Jalali's "A Military History of Afghanistan from the Great Game to the Global War on Terror, University Press of Kansas, 2017)

[1] It referred to the Second Battle of Fallujah fought in December 2004 by joint American, Iraqi and British forces. The operation code-named al-Fajr (dawn) was led by U.S. Marine Corps against insurgents’ stronghold in the Iraqi city of Falluja which was described by U.S. military as “some of the heaviest urban combat U.S. Marines have been involved in since the 1968 Battle of Hue City in Vietnam.