Washington — U.S. military forces are looking for new targets after bombing shut 50 caves and leveling 60 buildings at a former terrorist camp in eastern Afghanistan, Pentagon officials said Monday.
U.S. warplanes have struck the former al-Qaida site at Zawar Kili nearly every day since last Wednesday. Many civilians have fled the area, but a local security official said some al-Qaida members are still there.
Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem said the repeated bombing runs flattened every building and sealed most of the cave entrances in the area.
U.S. forces searched the caves to glean any intelligence information, then directed air strikes against specific targets so the caves or buildings couldn't be used again, the admiral said.
Precision-guided munitions from B-52 and B-1 bombers and F-18 strike jets from aircraft carriers were used, Stufflebeem said.
Stufflebeem said the area was a significant center of al-Qaida activity. After more than a week of intermittent strikes, Sunday's bombing appeared to be the heaviest since last month's strikes on the cave complex at Tora Bora farther northeast.
Zawar Kili was a spider web of caves and a weapons storehouse for the terrorists, Stufflebeem said. So much so, it was impossible for the American ground forces to bring in enough explosives to do their work, he said.
The admiral said he had not seen any reports of bodies found in the caves, but added: "I know we're not keeping a tally, if we had."
Sur Gul, the head of security in Khost province, said the cave complex near Zawar continues to shelter Islamic militants mostly Pakistanis, Chechens and some of bin Laden's Arab warriors.
Neither Stufflebeem nor Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke would say where U.S. forces might focus next.
The admiral said the Zawar Kili complex "is similar to what is probably the whole countryside, and therefore there are likely other valleys with other complexes" that could be targeted.
At the Pentagon, Clarke said the remains of six Marines have been returned to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The search continues for the seventh lost in last week's air crash in Pakistan.
Clarke said military officials in a mountainous area of southwest Pakistan were pressing ahead with the search for the seventh Marine, lost in the Wednesday crash of a KC-130 refueling plane.
Thirty al-Qaida prisoners arrived at a high-security jail on the U.S. Navy Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Monday afternoon. They were flown from the Kandahar airport in Afghanistan.
At least three of the prisoners at the base in Cuba are British nationals, according to a British Foreign Office official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
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