20 August 2008

KABUL - French President Nicolas Sarkozy flew into Kabul Wednesday and met survivors of an ambush that killed 10 French troops in the deadliest attack on international forces in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Sarkozy touched down at Kabul airport with his Defence Minister Herve Morin and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and immediately took a helicopter to Camp Warehouse, the base for French troops on the outskirts of the city.

He spent around five minutes in a mortuary holding the coffins of soldiers killed in the fighting about 50 kilometres east of Kabul on Monday and Tuesday, an AFP correspondent said.

Sarkozy also went to the camp hospital and spoke to 10 of the wounded.

And he met some of the other paratroopers involved in what he has described as "an extremely violent ambush."

He was due to hold talks with Michel Stollsteiner, a French general who is head of troops serving in NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Kabul and surrounds.

And he would meet President Hamid Karzai later Wednesday, the Afghan president's office said.

The French president said before he left France late Tuesday that his visit was to show the troops that "France is at their side".

"In its struggle against terrorism, France has just been hard hit," Sarkozy said.

It was the deadliest attack on international forces fighting extremists in Afghanistan since the US-led war which ousted the hardline Taliban regime in 2001.

It was also the deadliest on French soldiers since a 1983 bombing in Beirut in which 58 paratroopers were killed.

But Sarkozy has insisted France would not be deterred from its Afghan mission, for which it has 3,000 soldiers serving in the ISAF - made up of 53,000 troops from nearly 40 nations.

"This is a just cause, it is an honour for France and for its army to defend it," he said earlier.

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