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WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 28 2001
Spies lead US bombers to strike
BY ROLAND WATSON AND MARTIN FLETCHER
AMERICAN bombers attacked a Taleban compound near Kandahar after being told that Mullah Muhammad Omar was there last night.
The intelligence was received and the strike ordered while Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, was visiting the military’s central command headquarters in Florida, from where the war is being run. He said: “It clearly was a leadership area. Whoever was there is going to wish they weren’t.”
General Tommy Franks, commander of the US military operation, had earlier disclosed the two areas of Afghanistan where the Pentagon believes Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda and Taleban leaders are hiding: the area around Kandahar where Mullah Omar, the Taleban supreme leader, heads a garrison of around 5,000, and a larger area of mountainous territory in a triangle between Kabul, Jalalabad and Tora Bora.
Mr Rumsfeld had also said that the military were receiving a lot of intelligence on the whereabouts of bin Laden and his cohorts. “There’s no question that people find that the reward money is an incentive and are busily engaged in trying to earn it.”
General Franks went on to say that bin Laden’s foreign supporters holed up in Kandahar were seeking a way out and that the mere presence of a US Marine base near by would add to the pressure on the city.
The general also said that the Pentagon had identified 40 sites in Afganistan where al-Qaeda terrorists may have been developing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
He said that a “great deal” of chemical samples and laboratory paraphernalia had been found flown to the US for analysis: “If there’s anything there we will find it. We will not leave weapons of mass destruction in this country