WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. AC-130 flying gunship has destroyed a huge store of Taliban arms in Afghanistan (news - web sites)'s chill southern mountains, a sign the U.S. military still has much to do in the shattered country, the Pentagon (news - web sites) said on Friday.
dailynews.yahoo.com
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said the four-engine, turbo-prop special forces aircraft strafed the cache of arms and ammunition at two compounds north of Kandahar on Thursday after elite U.S. troops attacked the Taliban hide-out at Hazar Qadam.
Defense officials said on Thursday that the special forces soldiers killed up to 15 Taliban fighters and captured 27. Clarke told reporters on Friday the captives were ``relatively senior'' Taliban, but gave no more details.
``It has been described to me as a very large, huge cache of arms and ammunition,'' she said of the follow-up attack by the AC-130, which uses a devastating combination of heavy cannon and other weapons.
The cache included more than a half-million bullets for small arms, 400 16 mm mortar rounds, more than 300 rocket-propelled grenades, 300 100 mm rockets and thousands of rocket fuses in addition to more than 250 automatic grenade launcher rounds, according to Navy Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, a senior official on the military's Joint Staff.
``At this stage of the game, the fact that you can go into a place like this and find such a large supply of arms and ammunition is a significant sign that our efforts are far from over,'' Clarke said. ``There is a lot more work to do.''
The spokeswoman said the 27 Taliban were taken to a U.S. military detention facility at Kandahar and that the total number of Taliban and al Qaeda guerrilla detainees held by the military under tight guard in the country now totaled 302.
WATCHING FACILITY FOR SOME TIME
``We have been watching this facility for a while,'' Stufflebeem said of the Hazar Qadam attack.
``I don't know that we intend to go back and strike it again,'' he told reporters at a briefing. ``I think the general (Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks) is satisfied that that facility and what we wanted out of it has been taken care of.''
The admiral also told reporters that an unmanned U.S. ''Predator'' spy plane crashed while landing at a base near Afghanistan on Thursday, but the crash was not caused by groundfire. At least four other such unmanned reconnaissance drones have also crashed in or around Afghanistan.
In addition to the 302 detainees in Afghanistan, another 158 captives have been transported this month to a controversial makeshift jail at the U.S. Navy (news - web sites) base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But those transfer flights have been temporarily suspended while the secure jail facility is expanded.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Thursday pockets of resistance remained in Afghanistan despite the U.S.-led rout of Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al Qaeda group and the former Taliban government.
He said die-hard al Qaeda and Taliban supporters were continuing to fight in a number of places ``and we are going to keep at them until we get them.''
The United States launched its war in Afghanistan in October in response to the Sept. 11 attacks on Washington and New York, which killed more than 3,000 people.
The Taliban have been driven from power and U.S. forces are now hunting fugitive bin Laden, accused by Washington of masterminding the September attacks.
The U.S. military's bombing campaign has come to a virtual halt in Afghanistan over the past two weeks but American warplanes continue to fly more than 100 daily missions in the skies over that war-shattered country, looking for targets of opportunity. |
