Marines to join the hunt 'Net is getting tighter' in pursuit of bin Laden
11/20/2001
By Jack Kelley and Jonathan Weisman
USA TODAY
In what would be the largest buildup of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, up to 1,600 Marines are preparing to join hundreds of U.S. commandos as early as this week for a final drive to hunt down Osama bin Laden, military officials said.
Already, Afghan tribal chiefs have begun cave-by-cave searches in three slivers of Afghanistan, senior U.S. officials said. U.S. special operations forces are supporting the searches by providing new intelligence of bin Laden's suspected whereabouts, sealing off escape routes, and calling in airstrikes to destroy underground hideouts.
''We're hunting him down,'' President Bush said Monday. ''The net is getting tighter.''
About 300 to 500 U.S. special operations forces have begun blowing up bridges, setting roadblocks and watching Afghan borders to prevent bin Laden and his al-Qaeda forces from fleeing the country.
The Marines could take the pursuit to a new level, said Michael Vickers, a former special operations officer. The USS Bataan, a Marine amphibious assault ship, joined a similar ship, the USS Peleliu, this weekend in the Arabian Sea, a defense official said. Each ship has 600 to 800 Marine infantry troops trained for commando operations and ready to join the fight in Afghanistan.
The Marines could form large assault teams to back up commandos now on the hunt, Vickers said. An unknown number of CIA paramilitary units also have joined the search.
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke would not discuss the movement of Marine troops. ''We do not comment on operational details,'' she said.
But defense officials disclosed Monday that the Marines sent vertical-take-off Harrier jets into combat Sunday from the Peleliu.
Bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, is believed to be hiding either in the mountainous central Afghan province of Oruzgan, in a cave-riddled region east of Kandahar near Pakistan, or in caves in the Tora Bora region near the eastern city of Jalalabad, U.S. officials said.
Pentagon officials said they don't plan to let commandos join a cave-by-cave search because the caves are strewn with mines and booby-trapped with grenades.
Instead, the Pentagon is relying on air power and the lure of a $25 million bounty on bin Laden's head. That sum should spur ''a large number of people to begin crawling through those tunnels and caves,'' Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said.
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