Marines Attack Armored Column Near New Airbase
SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN ? U.S. Marine Cobra helicopters attacked an armored column and destroyed approximately 15 vehicles Monday "in the vicinity of" their new airbase outside Kandahar.
The gunships fired at the column after it was spotted by "fast-moving aircraft," Capt. David Romley said. He did not say whether the convoy belonged to the Taliban.
The attack was the Marines' first action since establishing a foothold Monday within striking distance of the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan
Romly indicated the attack was still going on shortly before midnight. He would not give any details about the location of the column or the direction in which it was moving, except to say it was "in the vicinity of this base."
Nor did he identify the "troops" who were attacked by the Marine gunships, but the Americans' new desert base puts them within striking distance of Kandahar, home of the Taliban militia that has sheltered Usama bin Laden.
Romley said the enemy column included tanks and BMPs ? armored combat vehicles on treads, mounted with guns and capable of carrying at least a dozen people, that were used by the Soviet army during its occupation of Afghanistan. When the Red Army departed in 1989, it turned scores of them over to its client regime, which later lost them to a variety of local militias and warlords.
The late-night assault came hours after U.S. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the attack task force, announced, "The Marines have landed, and we now own a piece of Afghanistan," signalling that America has entered a new stage in the War on Terror.
Hundreds of leathernecks are on the ground and have set up a desert airbase south of Kandahar, the birthplace and the last remaining holdout of the Taliban militia. The Marines have set up landing lights on the airstrip to enable transport planes to bring more troops and supplies to the area.
At a Pentagon news conference, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld declined to discuss in detail the purpose of moving Marines into Afghanistan, although he suggested they will be used to tighten the squeeze on Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders by limiting their movements from the Kandahar area.
Rumsfeld said "hundreds, not thousands" of Marines would "establish, hold and protect" their forward operating base.
The military campaign in Afghanistan is likely to take some time, as the Pentagon expects Taliban leader Mohammed Omar to fight to the death for Kandahar.
"We think they'll dig in and fight and fight perhaps to the end," said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We do not think it will over anytime soon."
President Bush, speaking to the press after meeting with two American aid workers freed by the Taliban, said the Marines in Afghanistan are "hunting down" the people responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
"We're smoking them out, they're running and now we're going to bring them to justice," Bush said.
The first wave of U.S. troops was ferried in by helicopter, while follow-on forces were being flown in on C-130 transport plans from an unidentified land base, said Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke.
The troop movement was expected to take at least another day to complete, and more than 1,000 Marines were involved, Clarke said.
At the same time, the Northern Alliance said its forces were "cleaning out" pockets of resistance in Kunduz, where thousands of Taliban troops and foreign Al Qaeda fighters loyal to bin Laden surrendered Sunday after a two-week siege. Wary alliance troops were going house-to-house to flush out stragglers, triggering an occasional firefight.
Outside Mazar-e-Sharif, hundreds of alliance fighters ? and some U.S. soldiers ? stormed a mud-walled fortress in an attempt to put down a suicidal prison insurrection by foreign militants that raged into its second day. Only a few dozen of the Pakistani, Chechen and Arab fighters were believed to be still alive, but they were firing rocket grenades from a tower at their erstwhile captors.
Numerous reports indicated that an American civilian working for the CIA had been killed when the uprising began Sunday. The Pentagon said only that no U.S. military personnel had been killed.
Clarke said five U.S. military men were injured in a "friendly fire" incident near Mazar-e-Sharif when a U.S. JDAM smart bomb went off-target. None of the injuries was life-threatening. Three of the injured were removed to Uzbekistan and the other two remained in Afghanistan.
With the commitment of ground troops, the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan enters a new phase. Instead of limiting themselves to small special-forces operations and airstrikes supporting advances by their Northern Alliance allies, American forces will now be actively participating in the search for bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders ? and exposing themselves to possible attack.
Bush cautioned that, as the war moves into this new phase, "America must be prepared for loss of life."
"Obviously, no president or commander in chief hopes anybody loses life in the theater, but it's going to happen," the president said.
"This is a dangerous period of time, this is a period of time in which we're now hunting down people responsible for bombing America,"
Kandahar, the Taliban's home base and spiritual center, has come under fierce bombardment since the U.S.-led military campaign began Oct. 7, and the Taliban have vowed to fight to the death rather than abandon the city. In the last three weeks, they have lost their grip on three-quarters of Afghanistan, plus the capital, Kabul.
Loud explosions rocked the area around Kandahar overnight and early Monday, with bright flares illuminating the night sky, a witness in the city said. Tribal leaders said their fighters, backed by U.S. bombardment, had pushed to within five miles of the city.
Pakistani journalist Nasir Malik, who is in Kandahar, said the center of the city was quiet Monday afternoon, with truckloads of armed Taliban soldiers driving through the streets. He said the Taliban appeared to be in control of the city airport too.
Malik said there was no sign of local Taliban officials in their offices. However, most of the top Taliban leadership is believed to be holed up in and around Kandahar, including their supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. The foreign minister of the Northern Alliance said he believed Omar and bin Laden were close together, but did not disclose his reasons for thinking so.
"The forces of the Taliban and the terrorist groups have been contained ... they have nowhere to go," Abdullah, who uses only one name, told a news conference in Kabul.
Word of the fall of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan came from the Northern Alliance, whose troops were trying to consolidate their hold on the city. Militant holdouts were believed to still pose a serious threat to the alliance forces, who first entered Kunduz Sunday.
As three captured men in turbans were placed into a pickup truck, hands bound behind their backs with dirty rags, children crowded around and taunted them, yelling "Talib! Talib!"
Pro-Taliban fighters fled toward the town of Chardara, to the west, with alliance troops in pursuit, said alliance foreign minister Abdullah, who uses one name. Thousands of others have surrendered over the past two days.
The alliance acknowledges that pockets of resistance remain in Kunduz ? particularly from hard-core Taliban from Kandahar and from foreign fighters loyal to bin Laden.
"Our forces ... are meeting some obstacles and some resistance, mostly from the foreign Taliban," Abdul Vadud, military attache at the Afghan embassy in neighboring Tajikistan, said Monday after speaking by satellite telephone with several field commanders.
"Our forces are cleaning out neighborhoods of Taliban," he said, adding that defenders were surrendering their weapons, but "only gradually."
The foreign fighters still inside Kunduz are comrades of the captured fighters who staged Sunday's uprising outside Mazar-e-Sharif. In it, the prisoners ? about 300 Chechens, Pakistanis and Arabs who surrendered Saturday from Kunduz ? seized weapons and used smuggled ones to try to fight their way out of the fortress.
The alliance said most of the prisoners were killed, but a hard core of holdouts was still battling alliance troops on Monday. A fighter named Massood who witnessed Monday's fighting said several dozen prisoners were firing rockets at Northern Alliance troops.
A Red Cross official, Simon Brooks, reported troop movements, gunfire and explosions at the fortress. "The security situation is not under control," he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
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