KANDAHAR - Elite United States troops attacked two guerrilla compounds in southern Afghanistan yesterday, killing up to 15 Taleban fighters and capturing 27 others, Pentagon officials said. One US soldier was wounded.
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the special forces strike 100km north of Kandahar showed pockets of resistance remained despite the US-led rout of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda group and the former Taleban government.
Rumsfeld and Air Force General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, refused to discuss numbers killed in the pre-dawn raid, but Myers said 27 Taleban were captured and a US Special Forces soldier was wounded in the ankle.
Other Pentagon officials said that as many as 15 Afghan Taleban fighters had been killed.
Rumsfeld said diehard supporters of al Qaeda and the Taleban were fighting on in a number of places in Afghanistan.
"We are going to pursue them ... and we are going to keep at them until we get them. We're doing it systematically and I think you can expect that it will continue for some period of time."
The latest action flared early in the day, officials said.
"This would never be described as a walk in the park. Any firefight is intense," Myers said in response to questions by reporters.
The general said intelligence information before the raid indicated that the two compounds might have been used by al Qaeda leadership but that instead they had apparently been used by Taleban leaders.
Myers said there was no immediate indication that Taleban leaders such as fugitive supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar had been killed or captured.
US forces are still hunting fugitive bin Laden, accused by Washington of masterminding the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
The US military's bombing campaign has come almost to a halt in Afghanistan over the past two weeks but American warplanes continue to fly over the war-shattered country looking for "targets of opportunity".
Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials have also said that the focus of the US military campaign has shifted to ground operations to root out al Qaeda and Taleban fighters and to search caves and tunnels for intelligence information in the war on terrorism.
- REUTERS
Story archives:
Links: War against terrorism
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
Taleban fighters die in US raid
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
