Kyrgyz unrest strands troops at Manas

Marines with Headquarters Battalion, 1st Marine Division Forwardm place their gear on pallets at Camp Manas, Kyrgyzstan, before boarding a flight March 24 for Afghanistan. The fall of the Kyrgyz government last week has had implications for operations at the air base, considered key to the war effort in Afghanistan.


Kyrgyz unrest strands troops at Manas
By Dan Lamothe - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Apr 14, 2010 12:50:10 EDT

Hundreds of U.S. troops are still stranded at a key air base in Kyrgyzstan following civil unrest there that resulted in personnel flights to Afghanistan being diverted through other countries, officials said.

About 400 U.S. troops are still stuck on the base waiting for flights home, even though U.S. officials said Friday that normal flight operations out of the Transit Center at Manas had resumed. A majority of those troops were Marines, many with Marines Combat Logistics Company 252, out of Camp Lejeune, N.C., which recently completed a six-month deployment in Afghanistan, a Marine at Manas told Marine Corps Times in a telephone interview.

“Not knowing is the worst,” said the Marine, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We’re on day nine here, and we still don’t know when we’re going home.”

Flights resumed briefly Monday at the air base in central Asia, allowing a few hundred troops to be flown back to the U.S., said Air Force Maj. John Redfield, a spokesman with U.S. Central Command. The Marine at Manas confirmed those details, but said CLC-252 and elements of other units were originally told to expect to fly home on April 18 or 20, and now may have to wait substantially longer. Members of the unit at Manas were told to be ready, but no new flight dates had been given, the Marine said.

Among the initially stranded troops who have left Manas already are Marines with III Marine Expeditionary Force, out of Okinawa, Japan, who deployed to eastern Afghanistan with an embedded training team whose Sept. 8 ambush made international news after Army officers repeatedly declined to send them fire support and three Marines, a U.S. soldier and a Navy corpsman died, Marine sources said. Redfield said Tuesday morning that he could not immediately confirm that to be true.


Rest of article at: http://marinecorpstimes.com/news/2010/04/military_manas_041410w/%20

I've gotten to it from here: http://marinecorpstimes.com/news/2010/04/military_manas_041410w/

(Edited to add link)

The Army Times and its sister publications are quite picky about the last '/'. And DU routinely chops them off.