French Mirages at Kandahar fly air support for CF

An update to this post:

As recently as four days ago, French fighter jets scrambled in response to a call for close air support from troops from the Quebec-based Royal 22nd Regiment fighting insurgents.

While details of that mission remain secret, it was not the first time France has come to the aid of Canadian ground troops fighting in Kandahar.

"I've helped the Canadians many times," said Lt.- Col. Fabien Mandon, commander of the Kandahar Air Expeditionary Group as he stood in front of one of the first three French Mirage 2000 jets to be based here. "But the nationality is not important. We will do this for everybody here."

The French air presence at Kandahar is less than two weeks old. Before that, the Mirages flew missions over Afghanistan from a base in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. But getting to the main battlefields in southern and eastern Afghanistan took more than one hour and required three refuelings from tanker aircraft. Being based in the heart of the war zone means pilots can get their jets over troops in distress in 15 minutes or less.

"I prefer to be here. This really puts us in the fight," Mandon said. "Even if pilots were well aware of what was going on in the operational area, we were too far away. Now we are in the middle of the rockets that fall on this base and we can understand better what is happening."

One of the best things about being in Kandahar was being able to speak with soldiers of the Royal 22nd Regiment, even if the accents of the Quebec-based troops were sometimes difficult to understand, Mandon said.

"We met a Canadian here last week who spoke French who had been on the ground during one of our combat missions," he said. "Such meetings are a real advantage of being here because we can improve our tactics. We can understand why they must do things we don't like and they can understand why we do things they don't like.

"We learned what the Canadians face on the ground. It is not just about us. They use artillery, too. It helps us better understand the fight."..

Although they can carry bigger weapons, they are mostly carrying 250 kilogram, laser-guided bombs.

Although such bombs were relatively small, they were being used because they were "powerful enough to kill Taliban and small enough to mitigate collateral damage to civilians and avoid blue on blue (friendly fire) accidents," said Lt.-Col. Gilles Juventin, a Tahitian who commands the French detachment in Kandahar.

"What we bring is firepower and this firepower can be decisive in some engagements. It means that friendly forces can have the advantage even if they are outnumbered, especially if they have been hit by an ambush. We are very reactive."

The French move from Dushanbe has been widely construed here and in NATO as a sign France and its new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is taking a greater interest in the war in Afghanistan, and in improving relations with the United States and its closest allies. This apparent shift comes at a time when NATO has been desperately trying to shore up political support for the combat mission in countries such as Canada and the Netherlands.

Dispatching Mirages to Kandahar has already won France the warm thanks of Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier.

The Harper government would be even happier if rumours about France sending a battalion or brigade of infantry south [emphasis added] where combat forces are badly stretched, turned out to be true.

In military terms, the French deployment was unusually swift. The decision to move south was only made six weeks ago and the French have already built a new apron designed to handle twice as many jets as are now scheduled to be based here.

First I've seen about French army units for the south--maybe related to this:

...Le commandant en chef de l'ISAF, le général américain Dan McNeal, a lui aussi demandé à la France d'augmenter sa contribution militaire d'au moins un bataillon.