Posted on 06/27/2002 7:21:41 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
KABUL, Afghanistan — About 100 U.S. soldiers — accompanied by 50 Afghan fighters — are scouring the rugged mountains in an area where a former Taliban official say Osama bin Laden maintained several hideouts.The little-publicized operation is under way in Kunar province north of Jalalabad along the Pakistan border, Afghan and U.S. officials said. First word of the operation came Tuesday when U.S. officials at Bagram air base said American forces came under mortar firein Kunar but suffered no casualties.
"The Americans are here in Kunar," according to local government spokesman Saeed Mohammed Safi, who provided the figure on the number of troops involved.
"But I can’t say for sure whether there are al-Qaida here," Safi said Wednesday. "We have a lot of mountains and gorges and forests where they can hide. But I haven’t seen any."
In Washington, U.S. officials said the operation was launched because of clues that important al-Qaida or Taliban figures may be hiding in the area. They would not elaborate.
Last spring, however, a former Taliban security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had accompanied bin Laden to his hide-outs in the mountains of Kunar province.
The official said that in one camp, al-Qaida maintained five satellite dishes which were camouflaged on a mountainside. While visiting the camp, the official said he heard conversations by satellite telephone in French and Arabic.
Most of the known al-Qaida camps are believed to be in six Afghan provinces: Kunar, Nangarhar, Logar and Paktia provinces in the east, and Kandahar and Helmand provinces in the south.
When the Taliban fled Jalalabad, the provincial capital of neighboring Nangarhar province, they took with them 2,500 Arabs, according to Maulvi Towha, the Taliban’s security chief there.
In a clandestine interview with The Associated Press in neighboring Pakistan, Towha — who presided over the destruction of the giant statues of Buddha of Bamiyan — said some of the Arab fighters headed northeast toward Kunar and others fled southeastward toward Tora Bora. Towha said bin Laden was not among them.
Some of the Arabs who headed north toward Kunar were killed in a gunbattle with anti-Taliban Afghans. Towha said that hundreds of others escaped into the mountains and some slipped across the border into Pakistan into a tribal area controlled by a radical Islamic cleric, Sufi Mohammed, who sent thousands of fighters to Afghanistan after the U.S.-led assault began last Oct. 7.
The forbidding mountains of Kunar have a history of harboring militants. Pakistan’s intelligence service trained Kashmiri militants in the area when former president Burhanuddin Rabbani ruled in Kabul in the mid 1990s, according to a former intelligence chief, Javed Nasir.
According to former guerrilla fighters, who didn’t want to be identified by name, many Arab fighters moved to the area because it was a stronghold of former anti-communist rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar — now on the U.S. wanted list.
One of Hekmatyar’s commanders, Kashmir Khan, still has a strong following in Kunar, Safi said. Other former guerrillas said there were reports that Hekmatyar was in Kunar several weeks ago.
Kunar also attracted fighters from the Middle East because of the presence of another major commander from the Soviet war, Jamil-ur-Rahman. He is a follower of the Wahabbi sect of Islam, which is the major brand of the religion in Saudi Arabia.
Rahman later clashed with the many Arabs living in Kunar as they began to assert their authority, following the collapse of Afghanistan’s communist regime in 1992. Rahman died in 1994. Safi said Rahman was assassinated by disgruntled Arabs in Pakistan’s border city of Peshawar.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.