Troops moved to bin Laden hunt
THE HERALD
IAN BRUCE, Defence Correspondent June 12 2006
UP to 400 elite British, American, Australian, Polish and Canadian special forces troopers are to be transferred from Iraq to Afghanistan to step up the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted man.
The development came as it emerged a member of Britain's armed forces was killed and another injured in Afghanistan yesterday. The MoD said the death occurred in a firefight against suspected Taliban forces in Helmand Province in the south-west of the country.
The soldiers facing relocation from Iraq are from Task Force 121, operating out of a base at Balad and Task Force Black, based in Baghdad.
They are the teams responsible for locating Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the al Qaeda terrorist leader killed last week in a US airstrike near Baquba.
The clandestine units were also central in capturing Saddam Hussein, cornering and killing his sons Uday and Qusay, and rescuing the British hostage Norman Kember.
With al Zarqawi gone, it is understood few key insurgents or fugitive members of Saddam's former government are still at large in Iraq.
Special forces soldiers and related intelligence resources are to be transferred to Kunar and Badakh, the mountainous Afghan provinces that share a border with Pakistan's tribal territories.
Troops on both sides of the border have been searching for bin Laden for five years since he and a handful of al Qaeda fighters retreated under air and ground attack on their Tora Bora position in Afghanistan's White Mountains.
Intelligence officers say the Saudi dissident has evaded capture and attack by hiding in a remote area guarded by Arab and Chechen fighters, and by avoiding use of satellite phones or traceable web connections.
Since 2001, when it was rumoured he had been severely wounded by shrapnel from an American bomb, he has surfaced every few months only on audio or video tapes passed to the Arab television station al Jazeera.
Bin Laden is also believed to have established a network of couriers to carry messages and orders by hand.
The messengers use cut-off points along their routes to make it impossible for hostile forces to backtrack and pinpoint his whereabouts.
Despite using surveillance satellites, no definitive fix on bin Laden has been possible. He and his deputy, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al Zawahiri, are also understood to avoid direct contact with each other.
Both are believed to be hiding in widely separated locations in the 10,000 square mile Pashtun tribal territories.
The allied special forces who will join the search include the British and Australian SAS, Poland's Grom commandos, Canada's Joint Task Force Two specialists, and US Delta and Navy Seal teams.
Meanwhile, allied troops in southern Afghanistan are facing a spring offensive by up to 6000 Taliban insurgents, according to a confidential US threat-assessment paper.
In Helmand, where 3300 British soldiers are now in place, the Taliban is thought to number between 1000 and 1500.
There are fears that the hardline Islamic fighters will switch tactics to concentrate on suicide bomb attacks and roadside booby-traps rather than pitched battles, after a series of skirmishes with UK paratroopers in the last two weeks left at least 30 Taliban dead at no cost to the British.
One paratroop patrol which came under fire in Helmland last week launched an immediate counter-attack. It killed 21 enemy gunmen in a running battle among mud houses.
The Parachute Regiment's Pathfinder platoon thwarted two ambushes on local Afghan police and army patrols the previous week and called in US and French air strikes, which killed a dozen more.
Brigadier-General David Fraser, the Canadian commander of forces in the area, said: "The Taliban has a great ability to strike and then blend back into the local population. It has to be said they are capable fighters, but no supermen. They are defeatable."
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