Wounded Friday, a paratrooper from the Cracow Paratrooper Brigade is still fighting for his life in a hospital at the US military base in
Rammstein, Germany. He was the driver of a Cougar, a MRAP-class US-made armoured vehicle, which was destroyed by an IED, or improvised explosive device.
This is bad news. It means that the taliban have found a way against a vehicle that until now guaranteed relative safety to the soldiers driving it. The taliban insurgents had long been attacking the Cougars and the Polish-made Rosomak APCs, but in most cases unsuccessfully.
Those attacks may have tore off the vehicle's wheel or damaged its armour plating, but the soldiers inside emerged with no more than a couple of bruises.
'They are banging at us using bazookas, planting powerful booby traps wherever they can, even firing mortars at the vehicles,' says a Cracow paratrooper serving in Afghanistan. 'They are obviously looking for a way against our vehicles and it looks like they've just found one.'
Gazeta has learned the details of the Friday attack in which a Cracow paratrooper was seriously wounded. The IED was not buried in the ground on the road or beside it. The taliban know now that it is impossible to destroy a vehicle this way, even using a hundred-kilogram charge.
This time they placed the device on a wall and set it off when the Cougar was passing it. The explosion took place level with the window of the driver's cab, in which sat the paratrooper now at Rammstein.
A day earlier, on Thursday, the rebels tried to destroy a Rosomak. Fortunately, the charge only tore off the vehicle's wheel. But the equipment is gradually running down - the shells and mines are damaging armour, chassis, suspensions. Though the troops are able to perform most of the repairs themselves, several Rosomaks were so badly damaged they had to be shipped back to Poland.
'Our contingent will receive 13 new Rosomaks by end-June,' a high-ranking Defence
Ministry official told Gazeta. 'We don't have and can't afford any more.'
This is because units in Poland have already been stripped of much of their equipment. The 12th Mechanised Brigade in Szczecin, for instance, has only a couple of Rosomaks left - none of these is armoured and fit for Afghanistan.
The Polish troops in Afghanistan are also expressing alarm at the fact that the taliban have been shelling their bases with increasing accuracy.
'We are like shooting targets. It's a miracle no one has been hit yet,' says an ensign at one of the bases.
In this situation, the army is eager to seek US support. As Gazeta has learned, defence minister
Bogdan Klich has asked the Americans to lease as many as 80 advanced APCs to Polish troops. This is a very big number, as now the Poles use 30 MRAPs such as the Cougar and 60 Rosomaks.
The man talking to the Pentagon is head of the General Staff, Gen Franciszek Gągor. The long wish list includes also special vehicles for sappers, such as the famous Buffalo MPV- an armoured vehicle with a large robotic arm for mine disposal.
Col Rajmund Andrzejczak, chief of the Polish contingent in Afghanistan, was until recently convinced that he would receive the new vehicles shortly. This has however turned out impossible.
'The Americans understand our needs but they have their own priorities,' Gen Gągor admits in a conversation with Gazeta.
Instead, another 200 troops will be sent to Afghanistan shortly, increasing the Polish contingent to 2,200 troops (compared with 1,600 in the previous round).
'The extra troops will be very much needed ahead of the August presidential elections,' says one of the Polish commanders. 'But we need hardware too because otherwise our boys will be walking on foot.'
Translated by Marcin Wawrzyńczak
