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Merkel at Afghan deaths memorial for first time
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Merkel at Afghan deaths memorial for first time
AFP - Saturday, April 10
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German Bundeswehr soldiers carry the coffins of three German soldiers, killed in a Taliban ambush in Afghanistan on April 2, outside of the Saint Lamberti church in Selsingen, northern Germany. German Chancellor Angela Merkel took part the a memorial service on Friday, becoming the first German post-war leader to attend such an event.
BERLIN (AFP) - – Chancellor Angela Merkel defended on Friday Germany's Afghanistan mission at a memorial service for the latest three German soldiers killed there, the first post-WWII leader to attend such an event.
"Our troops perform their service and fight in Afghanistan because we want to prevent terrorists attacking us here in Germany as well," Merkel said at the ceremony in a small church near the soldiers' barracks in northwest Germany.
"Our mission in Afghanistan is tough," she said. "But we cannot just absolve ourselves of our political responsibility for a stable Afghanistan from one day to the next, and just leave."
With the unpopular mission turning increasingly violent, Merkel flew back from a holiday early to pay her respects at the ceremony. After speaking, she bowed her head at the three coffins in turn, each draped in a German flag.
The deaths in a Taliban ambush of Nils Bruns, 35, Robert Hartert, 25, and Martin Augustyniak, 28, in northern Afghanistan on April 2 brought to 39 the number of German military personnel to have died there since 2002.
Eight other troops were wounded, four seriously, in a battle that raged for 10 hours, the German military said. NATO air support was unable to attack for fear of striking German soldiers or Afghan civilians.
The same day, German troops mistakenly shot dead six Afghan soldiers who were in a civilian vehicle whose driver ignored warnings to halt, the military said.
And in another sign of the growing intensity of the conflict, an improvised explosive device (IED) exploded next to a German patrol on Friday though there were no German casualties.
Bruno Kasdorf, a German general in Kabul, said last month that the NATO-run International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was planning a major offensive this year against the Taliban in the north where Germany's troops are based.
With some 4,500 troops, Germany has the third largest contingent in Afghanistan after the United States and Britain. Parliament approved another 850 soldiers in February.
Opinion polls show a majority of voters oppose the mission despite Merkel's insistence that it serves to make Germany a safer place. Berlin wants the troops to start coming home in 2011, an aim shared by Washington.
The government refuses to even classify the events in Afghanistan as "war", although Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg inched closer this week, saying the mission could "colloquially at least" be called war.
"The government made itself look ridiculous the way in which it avoided using the word," Herfried Muenkler, political science professor at Berlin's Humboldt University, told AFP.
"In Germany there reigns a profound conviction that this is war."
Merkel said on Friday: "In legal terms what is happening in large parts of Afghanistan is a non-international armed conflict.
"Most soldiers call it civil war, or just war. And I can well understand that."
She was due on Saturday at the German military's operations command in Potsdam for the first time since 2006 to hear first-hand from commanders about the mission.
The decision to do so was made at short notice in what her spokesman Christoph Steegmans said on Friday was a "direct consequence" of the latest deaths, and because of the "new quality" of the mission.
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