Corps slow to release Kajaki attack details - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Corps slow to release Kajaki attack details

A recent suicide bombing in Afghanistan’s Helmand province reportedly killed one Marine and critically wounded another, but the Marine Corps has said little about the attack.

The explosion occurred Jan. 18 at a bazaar in Kajaki Sofla, a section of Kajaki district that Marines assaulted in the fall. An insurgent on a motorcycle detonated an improvised explosive device at a bridge construction site, killing or injuring about 40 Afghan civilians and about nine Afghan police, the International Security Assistance Force said in a news release.

Coalition troops were among those killed and injured, another ISAF release said, but no additional details were disclosed.

The Marine Corps said in a subsequent news release that the dead included three Afghan policemen and 10 civilians. An additional two Afghan policemen were wounded and transported to a military hospital aboard Camp Bastion, a part of the Camp Leatherneck complex where II Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward) headquarters is located, the release said.

However, Marine officials have not released any information about the number of Marine casualties in the attack, or whether there were any. The dead include Cpl. Phillip McGeath, a member of 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, out of Camp Lejeune, N.C. His rifle company had been based in Kajaki since the assault there in October, and was scheduled to return from Afghanistan soon, his mother, Phyllis, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The Pentagon announced McGeath’s death Jan. 19, saying he had been killed in combat in Helmand. As is customary for Defense Department casualty notices, no additional details were provided.

Another Marine, Cpl. Christopher Bordoni, was critically wounded in a suicide bomb attack involving an insurgent motorcycle the same day in Kajaki, his family said in statement released to media in his hometown of Ithaca, N.Y. He has since been transferred to the San Antonio Military Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, the Ithaca Journal reported Jan. 23.

All questions about the attack were referred by spokesmen with II MEF (Fwd.) in Afghanistan to ISAF Joint Command in Kabul, the three-star command overseeing military operations across Afghanistan.

IJC officials declined to comment, however, stating that additional information must come from “national authorities,” including the Corps. Officers at Marine Corps headquarters in Washington referred comment back to Marine spokesmen in Helmand, who did not respond to several requests for additional information.

An ISAF spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Brian Badura, said there has been no change in the policy for releasing details about individual attacks. Typically, IJC releases general information about incidents, with each country involved releasing additional details as it sees fit. For the U.S., that means the individual branches of service or the Defense Department, he said.

Marine officials have released additional information about other attacks quickly in the past. For example, Marine spokesman in Helmand told Marine Corps Times in August 2010 that a detainee had escaped from an Afghan-run detention center on a base in Musa Qala, shooting to death two Marines and a contractor and wounding four other Marines and an Afghan National Police officer. The details were released within days of the attack.