Kandahar, Afghanistan — The United States insisted Thursday that all high-ranking Taliban and al-Qaida captives be turned over to U.S. custody, while a U.S. military team set out for Pakistan to bolster recovery efforts at the site of an airplane crash that caused the worst American casualty toll of the Afghan campaign.
A spokesman at the Marine base at Kandahar airport said the KC-130 tanker crashed into a mountain with its tanks nearly full, in line with witness accounts of a fiery explosion when it hit.
The team from Kandahar was to join U.S. and Pakistani recovery workers already at the site, five kilometers (three miles) from Pakistan's Shamsi air base, a forward operations point used by the U.S. military in the war in Afghanistan. The area in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, a remote region of rugged mountains and vast deserts was sealed off.
The seven deaths were the worst U.S. casualty toll from the war in Afghanistan. At the Kandahar base, Marines observed a moment of silence as a chaplain commemorated the dead.
In Kabul, U.S. displeasure at a decision by to allow seven high-ranking Taliban officials to go free had the interim government on the defensive.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Omar Samad told reporters Wednesday that the government was determining whether the Taliban officials were "war criminals." They included Nooruddin Turabi, the one-eyed, one-legged justice minister, who drew up the militia's repressive version of Islamic law including restrictions on women and created the religious police to enforce it.
They were freed in Kandahar after surrendering to Gov. Gul Agha's representatives, recognizing the new administration in Kabul and promising to stay out of politics, said Jalal Khan, a close associate of Agha.
U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in Washington that senior Taliban should be in U.S. hands and "we would expect that to be the case with these individuals."
The message was echoed by 1st Lt. James Jarvis, the Marine spokesman in Kandahar, who told a media briefing that he had no information about communications between Agha's office and the Marines about the Taliban leaders.
"We want any of the high-ranking Taliban or al-Qaida," Jarvis said. "We want to have them in custody."
Jarvis praised Agha for generally giving "a lot" of support to the U.S. forces in sharing intelligence and escorting convoys.
Negotiations on the surrender of ex-Taliban figures have frustrated the U.S.-led coalition as it pursues remnants of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network, blamed for the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington.
Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, who gave al-Qaida his country as a base of operations, reportedly escaped last week during surrender negotiations after being surrounded in the mountainous Baghran region.
Elsewhere, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press agency cited unidentified sources as saying several U.S. helicopters carrying about 50 troops arrived overnight at Khost, bringing the total to about 100 to 150.
U.S. ground forces and warplanes have gone into operation against a complex of caves, tunnels and buildings used as an al-Qaida training camp at Zawar Kili, near Khost, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.
The government was trying to determine who the seven men freed in Kandahar were and whether the decision to let them go was "appropriate," said Samad, the Foreign Ministry spokesman. He said so far there had been no U.S. request for their handover.
But Pentagon officials have said the new Afghan leaders are fully aware of the U.S. desire to have custody of certain Taliban and al-Qaida leaders.
Samad said the government only learned Wednesday that the Taliban prisoners had been freed. "We assume they went back to their homes and villages," said Samad. "Maybe guarantees have been given that they will not leave their villages."
He answered obliquely when asked if the interim government would hand the men over to the United States. "This is an issue that is being followed and should be followed by all concerned parties in Kabul and Kandahar."
"It's still not 100 percent certain for us either as to who exactly some of these people are," Samad said.
The former Taliban defense minister, Obaidullah, who approved the establishment of all al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan, was originally reported to have been one of the leaders. It is now thought the man in question was Ubaidullah, a front-line Taliban commander.
Kandahar was the birthplace of the Taliban movement in the early 1990s, and Omar remained based there even after the militia took power in most of the country in 1996. It was the last major Taliban-held city to fall, with the militia's leadership agreeing to abandon the city in early December.
Jarvis said that preparations were still under way for transferring prisoners held in Kandahar to a detention center being readied at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There are 351 detainees in Kandahar, but it is unclear how many will eventually be sent to Guantanamo.
The military, mindful of the uprising by al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif in November that caused the death of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, is taking no risks in dealing with the detainees, Jarvis said.
"We are determined to make sure we do not repeat the mistakes of Mazar-e-Sharif," Jarvis said.
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