Task Force Uruzgan arrived in August 2006 with approximately 1,200 Dutch troops and several hundred Australians, replacing American forces under Operation Enduring Freedom. Their strategy bore a name from counterinsurgency doctrine: the inkspot approach. Secure small areas around two main bases, Kamp Holland near Tarinkot and another at Deh Rawood, then gradually expand. A Provincial Reconstruction Team would follow behind, building infrastructure and winning trust. The Chora Valley, about 30 kilometers north of Tarinkot, had been cleared during an earlier Dutch-Australian offensive in 2006, but no permanent garrison stayed behind. Instead, the Dutch ran irregular patrols, hoping presence without permanence would suffice. The PRT built a school, a mosque, and a bridge. For a while, Chora looked like the inkspot strategy working as intended.

The Taliban understood Chora's value: it sat astride the ground route linking the contested Gizab District in the north to Tarinkot, the provincial capital. Losing it would sever a critical corridor. On June 15, 2007, anti-coalition fighters launched what press reports later called the largest Taliban offensive of the year in Afghanistan. They overran checkpoints, pushed into the district center, and forced the small Dutch and Afghan contingent into a shrinking perimeter around the government compound. Reinforcements arrived under fire. On the night of June 17, as soldiers loaded an L16 81mm mortar in the compound courtyard, a round detonated inside the launch tube. Sergeant-Major Jos Leunissen was killed instantly; three other Dutch soldiers were wounded. He became the battle's only Dutch fatality, but the fighting was far from over.

By June 19, the situation had grown desperate enough for extraordinary measures. At 9:30 that morning, NATO briefly pulled aircraft away from Chora to support operations elsewhere. Colonel Hans van Griensven, commanding the second TFU rotation, reportedly threatened to withdraw the six Dutch F-16s from NATO command entirely if air support was not restored. Within ten minutes, the aircraft were back. At 10:00, Dutch and Afghan troops launched Operation Troy alongside the militia of a local strongman named Rozi Khan, recapturing three lost checkpoints. The alliance with local militias was pragmatic and imperfect, the kind of arrangement that complicates neat narratives about reconstruction missions, but it helped turn the tide.

When the fighting subsided, the toll was staggering and deeply uneven. One Dutch soldier had been killed. Approximately 70 Taliban fighters died. But the number that would come to define Chora in the years that followed was the civilian death toll: between 50 and 80 men, women, and children killed in the crossfire and airstrikes that saved the district center. Many were families who had no stake in the fight and no means of escape. These were the people the reconstruction mission was supposed to help. Dutch journalists at de Volkskrant would later investigate the civilian casualties under the headline asking what went wrong in Uruzgan at the Battle of Chora, documenting ignored warnings and questioning whether the cost of holding the valley could ever be justified by the original promise of building rather than fighting.

Chora sits in a narrow valley in Uruzgan, one of Afghanistan's most remote and impoverished provinces. From the air, the landscape is austere: brown ridgelines creased by dry riverbeds, scattered compounds of mud-brick walls, a district center that barely registers against the immensity of the terrain. The battle here was not a set-piece engagement between armies but a close-range fight among homes and fields, where the line between combatant and civilian was often impossible to draw. For the Dutch military, Chora became both vindication and reckoning. They held the ground, fought hard, and did not repeat Srebrenica. But the civilian dead posed a question that no amount of rebuilt schools could answer: what a reconstruction mission becomes when the reconstruction cannot proceed without this kind of violence.