BAGRAM, Afghanistan, 12 December 2003 — Nearly a week into a sweeping drive across Afghanistan’s tribal badlands, thousands of US soldiers have so far failed to engage any Taleban or allied militants, the army said yesterday. Instead, the US Army has angered the very people it is trying to win over by killing 15 children in two botched raids.
US military spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty said soldiers of the US 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment helicoptered into Paktia province on Monday as part of “Operation Avalanche” had yet to make contact with the enemy. But he said they had conducted patrols and cave searches over a 100 sq km area as part of the offensive, which is being touted as the biggest ground operation since the Taleban’s overthrow in late 2001.
“The fact that we did not hit the jackpot here is not indicative that the air assault was not successful,” he said. “We will continue to interdict their routes of communication and we will find them eventually.”
The troops from the Parachute Regiment are among about 2,000 US soldiers supported by Afghan troops taking part in the operation aimed at disrupting a resurgence in militant activity across the rugged tribal lands of the south and east.
Since the fall of the Taleban, the US military has only engaged Taleban and Al-Qaeda forces in two major ground battles, the latest in August in the mountains of Zabul province when it said it killed more than 100 enemy fighters.
Otherwise Taleban and Al-Qaeda forces have proved almost as elusive as their leaders, Mulla Mohammad Omar and Osama Bin Laden, staging hit-and-run attacks before melting into the mountains or back into the civilian population.
Asked what was discovered in the cave searches, Hilferty replied: “I don’t believe we found anything spectacular. All we found so far were regular small arms and small arms ammunition. We can find that in any village of Afghanistan.”
Hilferty said the operation would help establish conditions for the provision of humanitarian aid, which has all but dried up in the south and east since the Taleban began a campaign to target aid and reconstruction workers.
As part of this effort, the United States established a Provincial Reconstruction Team in the city of Kandahar yesterday made up of 80 military personnel charged with bolstering security and carrying out reconstruction work in four provinces. The team is the seventh established in the country.
Proof the guerrillas are still active came when ten 107mm rockets landed in and around the US base at Orgun-E in Paktika province on Wednesday, wounding a US soldier and an Afghan civilian. Hilferty rejected a suggestion that the deaths of the children in attacks in Ghazni province and near Gardez last week showed the US military was too quick to launch raids, but conceded they had a negative impact.
Six Afghan fighters died in an exchange of fire at a maternity hospital as US soldiers tried to arrest a local military commander in the Afghan city of Jalalabad, witnesses said. US soldiers blocked access to the hospital after the clash, but people who said they saw the incident said four of Cmdr. Esmatullah’s bodyguards were killed along with two soldiers from Jalalabad’s militia force.
A Reuters reporter later saw five bodies, three of them in military uniforms and the other two in civilian clothes, on the floor of a nearby hospital where another Afghan fighter was being treated for his wounds. Hospital doctors said the bodies were brought there from the maternity hospital, but declined to say who they were or if they had died in the fight with US soldiers.
Afghan authorities have lost control of 80 percent of one of the country’s most troubled southeast border provinces, Zabul provincial deputy governor Mawlawi Mohammad Omar told AFP yesterday. “Although the Taleban don’t have direct control over the area, the provincial administration has failed to apply its rule in 80 percent of the province,” Omar said.
Only three districts along a key highway linking Kabul with the main southern city Kandahar — Shahjoy, Shahr-e-Safa and the capital Qalat — are under government control. “We are in control of only three districts and that is because the highway passes through the centers of these districts,” he said.
Zabul, bordering Pakistan, is on the front line of a resurgence by Taleban fighters regrouping in southern Afghanistan and western tribal areas of Pakistan.
