{"id":750,"date":"2007-12-16T13:16:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-16T13:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=750"},"modified":"2008-12-20T20:48:17","modified_gmt":"2008-12-20T20:48:17","slug":"reporting-musa-qala","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/12\/reporting-musa-qala\/","title":{"rendered":"Reporting from Musa Qala"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcaps\">M<\/span>y friend <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.stephengrey.com\/\"><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Stephen<\/span><\/a>, who really should be at home writing a book or in comfortable semi-retirement, is actually <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/blogs.abcnews.com\/theblotter\/2007\/12\/exclusive-eyewi.html\">here<\/a>: <span id=\"fullpost\"><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>As the only journalist to join NATO forces entering the town, I found it a ghost town abandoned by both the Taliban and its residents at the end of an eight-day coalition operation. The offensive was one of NATO\u2019s biggest in the country since Operation Anaconda in 2002.<\/p>\n<p>Embedded with a team of British troops and a detachment\/\u201cA\u2013team\u201d of U.S. special forces, I watched the Taliban being pounded these last few days with overwhelming force &#8212; vapour trails circled in the clear blue sky over the Helmand desert as B1 and B52 bombers backed by A10 tank busters, F16s, Apache helicopters and Specter gunships were used to kill hundreds of Taliban fighters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If Stephen hadn\u2019t been there, you might never had heard of this operation &#8211; independently and at first-hand. It\u2019s called reporting.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My friend Stephen, who really should be at home writing a book or in comfortable semi-retirement, is actually here: As the only journalist to join NATO forces entering the town, I found it a ghost town abandoned by both the Taliban and its residents at the end of an eight-day coalition operation. The offensive was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=750"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2489,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750\/revisions\/2489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}