Washington — U.S. special forces captured 27 suspected Taliban leaders and killed others in a raid Thursday on two military compounds in central Afghanistan, the Pentagon said.
The raid, in which one American serviceman was reported wounded in the ankle by enemy fire, marked a sudden burst of activity on a war front that had grown quiet for two weeks.
There were also reports from Pakistani news media that American warplanes had attacked al-Qaida hideouts near Khost in eastern Afghanistan. The U.S. Central Command said it could not immediately confirm or deny the report, which, if true, would mark the first American bombing since Jan. 11.
The latest Taliban "detainees," as the Pentagon called them, were locked up at the 101st Airborne Division base near the airport in Kandahar, where they joined 270 other Afghan war prisoners. The Pentagon has temporarily halted transferring prisoners to a more secure facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because with 158 prisoners it is almost full.
In Thursday's firefight, "we initially thought it was al-Qaida leadership, but ... we found out it was mainly Taliban leadership," Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the Pentagon.
The military is hoping that the newest captives will provide intelligence. The Pentagon said previously that interrogation of other prisoners had helped forestall terrorist attacks, including an apparent plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Yemen.
The raid took place in a mountain region north of Kandahar in Uruzgan province. This was an area where the military had not announced previous raids.
"There are a lot more of these pockets," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said. "We are going to pursue them. We are pursuing them now. We pursue them alone. We pursue them with coalition forces. We pursue them with Afghan forces. And we are going to keep at them until we get them."
Myers said he did not know how many Taliban figures had been killed. He said he was unable to provide details of the raid, "because we still have our eyes on the targets there and there is a potential for further action."
Reports from Kandahar said that an AC-130 aerial gunship, equipped with Gatling guns and other firepower, had destroyed a cache of Taliban weapons.
Asked if the United States had hoped to capture Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in the raid, Myers declined to answer. Omar and al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, blamed by the United States for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, together are a main focus of continuing American military action.
"We don't have a lot of detail on exactly how long (the raid) lasted," Myers said. "But it was any firefight is intense. This one obviously was. We had a soldier wounded in the middle of it."
The name of the wounded man was not released. A Central Command spokesman at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida said the soldier was being treated at a medical facility and was in stable condition.
In an unrelated military development, Myers reported that, for a third day in a row, the coalition forces patrolling the no-fly zone over southern Iraq had been fired on from the ground and had returned fire. Iraq identified the planes as U.S. and British.
Myers said the planes, participating in Operation Southern Watch, had dropped precision-guided bombs on anti-aircraft and missile sites.
No comments
Commenting is turned off for this story.