FLAGS ALL over the country will fly at half mast and a minute’s silence will be observed in all public offices and schools on Monday as Italy prepares to mourn the six paratroopers killed in a car bomb attack in Kabul on Thursday.
The six soldiers, all of southern Italian origin, will be honoured with a state funeral due to be held in the Roman Basilica of St Paul Without The Walls.
Even as government ally, the Federalist Northern League, called for a total Italian pull-out of Afghanistan in response to the tragedy, both state president Giorgio Napolitano and prime minister Silvio Berlusconi indicated that Italy would honour its commitments in Afghanistan.
President Napolitano said that Italy’s part in the Nato-led mission had always been “balanced” between military and civilian objectives. Speaking from Tokyo, where he was completing a state visit to Japan, the president added: “I do not believe there is anything to revise in the orientation we have adopted”.
Prime minister Berlusconi said that Italy would not be taking a “unilateral” decision to withdraw but would act in consultation with its mission partners. In a message left at the army’s shrine to the fallen in Rome yesterday, the prime minister described the dead soldiers as “the best of Italy”, adding that he was “grief-stricken but proud of the courage and abnegation of our boys”.
However, Mr Berlusconi did suggest that a “transition strategy” is badly needed in Afghanistan, whereby the Afghan government takes more responsibility for security, at the same time allowing Nato to reduce its troop numbers. He said that the 500 extra troops sent by Italy to help oversee the recent electoral process would come home by the end of the year, leaving the Italian contingent at 2,795, the fourth-largest in the Nato-led ISAF mission.
Thursday’s deaths bring the total number of Italian troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001 to 20, while the car bomb attack represents Italy’s biggest military loss of life since 19 men were killed in Nasirya, Iraq, in 2003.
Inevitably, TV, radio and newspaper devoted much time and space to the bombing attack. Nearly all dailies carried banner headlines, ranging from “Kabul, The Killing of Italians” in La Stampa to “React or Just Come Home” in Il Giornale.
Many commentators pointed out that all of the victims were of southern Italian origin. Roberto Saviano, author of the award-winning best-seller on the camorra, Gomorra, pointed out that the Italian soldiers had been caught up in a vicious pincer movement.
Many of them had been forced to take a job in the army as the only exit strategy from Italian regions like Campania and Calabria, devastated by organised crime. Saviano goes on to point out that Afghanistan is today responsible for the production of 90 per cent of the world’s heroin supply. Ironically, crime organisations such as the Camorra, which force young southerners into the army, have struck a whole series of “business arrangements” with those very Taliban groups, presumed responsible for Thursday’s killings.