KABUL, Afghanistan — After receiving information it was being used by senior leaders of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and another alleged terrorist group, the Pentagon ordered airstrikes Tuesday on an Afghan compound southeast of Kandahar, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said.U.S. officials told Fox News that it was believed Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar may have been in the compound, but said there was no specific intelligence confirming that he was there right before the attack. The officials said in addition to comments made by Omar's associates, the U.S. has its own separate intelligence indicating that Omar has been in the area of Kandahar in recent days.
The information about the target came into U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., while Rumsfeld was visiting Tuesday afternoon.
U.S. F-16 jets and B-1B bombers attacked two targets with precision-guided weapons, military officials said.
Pentagon officials didn't say who may have been in the compound and possibly killed, though Rumsfeld told reporters "It clearly was a leadership area" and he said those targeted were "non-trivial."
"Whoever was there is going to wish they weren't," he said.
Rumsfeld said the compound was thought to hold leaders of the ruling Taliban militia, Usama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization and Wafa, a Saudi humanitarian aid organization that was among several groups named by the United States as alleged money conduits for bin Laden and his network.
(snip)
Omar picky about paint, pampered his herd of cows
Taliban leader's builder exposes his private life
Araminta Wordsworth
National Post, with files from The New York Times
Brennan Linsley, The Associated Press
A construction worker who spent two years working on building projects for Mullah Mohammed Omar says the Taliban's reclusive leader spent hours tending to the needs of his four pampered cows while ignoring his eight children, who were dressed in dirty clothes and ran about the compound barefoot.
"Mullah Omar would often go to admire and stroke the cows," which lived in a walled garden behind his house in Kandahar, Mohammed Charef, a native of Kabul, told the French newspaper Le Monde.
"Then he would spend hours watering the grass they would feed on.... He was a savage. It was really strange to see the dirty children and the cows."
During his time in Kandahar, Mr. Charef helped to build eight houses, including Mullah Omar's main residence, which also housed three of his wives, a mosque where the mullah would pray with his friends, and a network of subterranean galleries carved out of the hillside. The building specifications included walls 1.25 metres thick and reinforced roofs.
"The plans had been prepared by military engineers," he said. "The buildings had to be protected against missiles and rockets, and the secret shelters were very sophisticated."
They included offices, bedrooms, bathrooms and a ventilation system. There were three escape routes, each leading to a different exit.
On visits to the construction site, the Taliban leader paid little attention to security, something Mr. Charef found astonishing for a man who "was surrounded by a corps of 200 bodyguards and who only left his compound in a convoy of 10 identical jeeps so no one would know which one he was riding in."
The mullah was a picky client who could not decide what colour paint he wanted and insisted on chandeliers imported from Japan.
"His house had to be repainted five times because he changed his mind about the colour of the walls," said Mr. Charef.
Life in the compound was boring, rather than onerous. The food was bad -- "we were fed on blackened potatoes and the rice was poor" -- and the workers had trouble with Mullah Omar's bodyguard, who considered the Kabul imports "infidels."
The events of Sept. 11 put a sudden end to his work.
"I heard the news some time afterward on the radio, but during the day I noticed Mullah Omar suddenly sent off his family -- and his four cows in the back of a truck -- to a safe place," he said.
"The next day we were told our work was finished and we were given half an hour to pack up and leave. It was the end of my two years' imprisonment by the Taliban."
Wow, these guys have infiltrated us further than I thought. Great grammar, FOX News.