"I don't think it's right for me to talk about accuracy or not," Franks said. "I will say this; that I think we are best served when informed sources really are informed."
Gen. Franks Denies New Yorker '12 Wounded' Report
Sunday Nov. 4, 2001; 10:23 a.m. EST
The U.S.'s top military man in Afghanistan, Gen. Tommy Franks, denied a report Sunday morning that twelve Delta Force commandos were wounded in a firefight with Taliban forces during an Oct. 20 raid on a complex occupied by Taliban leader Mullah Omar.
"We had no one wounded by enemy fire," Franks told ABC's "This Week." "And I think that is probably worthwhile noting."
A report in the New Yorker magazine slated to hit newsstands Monday claims that U.S. Special Forces took heavy casualties, with three commandos "seriously wounded," in the "near-disaster" mission.
"As (U.S. commandos) came out of (Omar's) house, the s - - t hit the fan," New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh claims one senior officer told him. "It was like an ambush. The Taliban were fighting with light arms and either (rocket-propelled grenades) or mortars."
But Gen. Franks told ABC News that most of the U.S. casualties were "bumps and scatches" that were incurred -- not in any firefight -- but during the parachute jump into the region.
"We had young people who jumped into one of these objectives with parachutes," the U.S. military chief explained. "We had a bunch of these young people who had scratches and bumps and knots from rocks and all this sort of stuff.
"And so it's probably accurate to say that maybe five or maybe twenty-five people were, quote, wounded," Franks said. But then he added, "We had no one wounded by enemy fire."
Franks said that, contrary to the New Yorker report, the raid on Omar's complex was a military success.
"In fact, these objectives were overwhelmed by the forces that went in and the forces exfiltrated precisely on the timeline that we said they'd be on," he told ABC News.
Without challenging the accuracy of Hersh's report directly, the U.S. commander suggested the writer's sources didn't know what they were talking about.
"I don't think it's right for me to talk about accuracy or not," Franks said. "I will say this; that I think we are best served when informed sources really are informed."
newsmax.com |
