French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Defense Minister Herve Morin immediately boarded a plane for Afghanistan. Sarkozy attended a memorial service this morning and visited the wounded, then meet with military commanders and Karzai, according to a statement from the presidential palace.
French forces, who first came to Afghanistan in 2002, had until now suffered relatively light casualties, compared with U.S., British and Canadian troops, who are deployed in the most dangerous areas, in the south and east.
Since the U.S.-led invasion, 934 coalition troops have lost their lives, 578 of them American, according to the website icasualties.org. So far this year, 185 coalition troops (103 American) have died.
France has lost a total of 22 troops, Britain 116 and Canada 90. Several other nations have lost troops, including 25 from Germany and 23 from Spain.
The French losses represented the largest number of Western troop fatalities in a single incident in Afghanistan in more than three years. The only larger clusters of foreign military fatalities since the conflict began have involved downed aircraft.
The Taliban leadership, which generally has a sophisticated grasp of the domestic political situation in nations that provide troops to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force, has sometimes specifically targeted troops from countries in which they believe there is significant opposition to the Afghanistan mission.
Sarkozy drew domestic criticism from both the left and far right for his decision to send 700 additional French troops soon to Afghanistan, bringing the French contingent to more than 2,500.
Adding an emotionally difficult dimension to military authorities' account of the battle, the Associated Press quoted an Afghan official who spoke on condition of anonymity as saying four of the French soldiers were taken prisoner by the insurgents and then killed. But French officials later said nearly all the deaths were thought to have occurred in the first few moments of the ambush.
The area where the fighting took place is known to be a stronghold of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a veteran Taliban- allied commander with a reputation for brutality. He is believed to be based in Pakistan's tribal areas.
The attack against the U.S. base in the city of Khowst, near the Pakistan border, was described by military officials as involving a team of suicide bombers who stormed the gates of the base, a large and well-fortified logistical hub known as Camp Salerno.
