PARIS (AP) — France's president and military leadership paid homage Tuesday to seven soldiers killed in Afghanistan in an exceptionally deadly week, as international forces prepare to wind down the decade-long Afghan operation.
The rain-soaked funeral ceremony at the site of Napoleon's tomb came as some in France are questioning the role of the military, with thousands of forces stretched across operations around Africa and the Middle East.
"You did not die for nothing," Sarkozy in tribute to the seven soldiers killed in Afghanistan last week.
"You fought in a just war, against a tyranny that imprisoned an entire people, that oppressed women, that kept children in ignorance, that transformed an entire country into a stronghold of terrorism," he said, referring to the Taliban.
Five of the soldiers were killed in an attack targeting French troops in the Kapisa province just after Sarkozy visited Afghanistan.
International forces are starting to hand over control of some areas to the Afghan government as part of a plan for a pullout of foreign combat forces by the end of 2014.
France is the fourth-largest contributor to the U.S.-led force, and has had troops there since 2001. Seventy French troops have been killed the campaign.
The father of a French soldier killed in Afghanistan in 2008 expressed disappointment at the pullout, given continuing violence.
"What will the return of the troops bring?" he asked on Europe-1 radio Tuesday. A withdrawal will mean France has "spilled blood, the blood of our children, and Afghanistan will go back to what it was before," he said.
In Tuesday's ceremony, Sarkozy and several government ministers stood beneath a chilly downpour as they watched the coffins carried past, draped in the French tricolor.
Sarkozy vigorously defended the French military, which came under fire last week from a presidential candidate who said that the Bastille Day armed forces parade should be replaced by a civilian ceremony.
The mainstream left and right assailed Eva Joly, candidate for the Europe Ecologie-Greens party, for the suggestion, seen as unpatriotic on a week marking the July 14, 1789 storming of the Bastille prison that helped spark the French Revolution, and a week in which seven soldiers died in action.
"The French army is the affirmation by the French people of its will to remain free and never become anyone's slave," Sarkozy said. "The French army is not separate from the rest of the French nation."
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