U.S. Forces Raid Taliban Compounds
15 Enemy Fighters Killed, 27 Caught; 1 American Hurt
By Steve Vogel and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 25, 2002; Page A01
U.S. Special Forces raided two Taliban compounds in the mountains north of Kandahar yesterday, killing at least 15 fighters and capturing 27 others in one of the largest known U.S. ground combat operations of the Afghanistan war, Defense Department officials said. One American soldier was wounded by enemy fire.
The simultaneous raids were launched by teams of Special Forces soldiers shortly after midnight, local time, against two compounds near the village of Hazar Qadam, about 60 miles north of the Kandahar airport. Unlike much of the war, in which U.S. troops have moved against enemy forces with the help of local anti-Taliban Afghan militias, the operation was carried out solely by U.S. soldiers, defense officials said.
The 27 prisoners -- primarily Taliban members and possibly including some senior people, according to Pentagon officials -- were taken to the U.S. base in Kandahar for interrogation. U.S. forces also discovered a large cache of weapons and ammunition in the area, and they called in an AC-130 gunship to destroy it. In addition to those fighters captured or killed, an unspecified number of others fled and were being sought by U.S. forces, according to defense officials.
The raids underscored how the war in Afghanistan is far from over as U.S. forces search for Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, and Mohammad Omar, the head of the Taliban regime that sheltered the terrorist network. They suggested that U.S. troops could face combat there for months to come.
Although the Taliban was routed from Afghan cities more than a month ago and the last major concentration of al Qaeda fighters was broken soon afterward with the U.S.-led assault on the Tora Bora redoubt in eastern Afghanistan, American troops continue to encounter bands of armed Taliban and al Qaeda fighters.
Over the past month, U.S. warplanes have flown intermittent bombing attacks against isolated targets, primarily in the mountainous region along the Pakistani border, while commandos supported by Marines have conducted cave-to-cave searches and nighttime raids against suspected terrorist hideouts.
"I think the long and the short of it is, there are a lot more of these pockets," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said during a news conference at the Pentagon. "We are going to pursue them. We are pursuing them now. . . . And we're going to keep at them until we get them."
Yesterday, U.S. search teams were focusing on five different areas of the country, a senior military officer said. Among them were the mountains north of Kandahar and the rugged terrain of Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan, where in recent weeks U.S. forces have reported finding caves and above-ground encampments being used by al Qaeda as munitions storage facilities and regrouping sites.
"There are unquestionably pockets of them and, in some cases, not small pockets, but somewhat larger than small," Rumsfeld said. He said Taliban and al Qaeda fighters are able to move and hide in various parts of the country by traveling in some "narrow, confined areas" in the mountains.
The U.S. raids near Hazar Qadam included intense fighting, officials said. "I think this would never be described as 'a walk in the park,' " Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the Pentagon news conference.
"There were a number of bad guys killed, so there was obviously some measure of resistance," a defense official said.
The wounded U.S. Special Forces soldier, who was not identified, was hit in the ankle by enemy gunfire and was evacuated to a U.S. military hospital in the Afghanistan region, officials said. They described the wound as slight.
He was the first known U.S. battlefield casualty since Army Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Chapman was killed on Jan. 4 in an ambush in eastern Afghanistan.
Based on intelligence reports, U.S. forces expected that they might capture senior members of al Qaeda in the raids and were surprised to encounter mostly Taliban forces, officials said. "Once the compound was raided, [we] found that it was mostly of Taliban nature," Myers said.
Myers declined to say whether U.S. forces thought that Omar might have been in the area, but one defense official said intelligence indicated that Omar had, at least, been there. "That is an area where Omar reportedly has been," the official said.
Defense officials said they were not certain whom they had captured. "We're sorting through them to find out the level of leadership involved," Myers said. Rumsfeld said there were indications that those caught are "not simply foot soldiers."
U.S. forces wanted to capture as many of the Taliban or al Qaeda fighters as they could for purposes of interrogation, according to Myers. "The intent, if we think they have intelligence, . . . which you would presume these people would, is to take them alive, so you can garner the intelligence," he said.
Myers described the two compounds attacked in the raids as "mainly an above-ground complex," but he added that, "like all those complexes, there's a lot of other pieces and parts to it."
U.S. fighter aircraft were available to assist in the attacks but were not used, officials said.
Pentagon spokesmen who had been briefed on the raids said they were unable to say whether the compounds had been known to U.S. forces earlier in the war as Taliban hideouts and had been previously attacked, or whether they were only recently discovered.
Myers declined to reveal details of the raids, indicating that further operations in the area are possible. "We still have our eyes on the targets there, and there is a potential for further action," he said.
Much of the job of locating and routing the various Taliban and al Qaeda "pockets of resistance," as Pentagon officials call them, still rests with several hundred members of Special Operations forces, reflecting Rumsfeld's desire to limit the size of the U.S. military deployment in Afghanistan. While the total number of U.S. troops in the country has swelled to more than 4,000, the majority consists of conventional combat forces assigned to protect bases, plus special-skill groups such as engineers, forensic experts and interrogators.
"To do the searching, we have quick reaction forces ready to go, and we also have teams out and about, combing different locations," a senior military officer said.
The mission of finding and destroying all the pockets, Rumsfeld acknowledged, is daunting. "We have to . . . straightforwardly admit the reality is that . . . no one can know precisely where all of the remaining al Qaeda and Taliban [members] are," he said.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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