WASHINGTON/KABUL, 27 November — A ground war in Afghanistan seemed more like a reality than ever yesterday when hundreds of US Marines took over an airstrip near the Taleban’s last major holdout of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. Marine helicopter gunships immediately attacked an armored column “in the vicinity of” the new base, destroying some of the 15 vehicles including tanks and BMPs (armored combat vehicles on treads, mounted with guns and capable of carrying at least a dozen people).
The Pentagon also disclosed that “friendly fire” had hurt American troops trying to quell a prison revolt in the north at Mazar-e-Sharif. Armed with weaponry seized during Sunday’s uprising in Qala-e-Jangi prison west of the northern town of Mazar-e-Sharif, the prisoners traded gunfire with around 500 Alliance soldiers who had encircled them.
Numbering around 600 when they surrendered to Alliance forces in the town of Kunduz on Saturday, some 400 have already been killed, according to one Alliance commander. Another said “almost all” are dead. During the day, tanks and mortar fire pounded the fortress, while Kalashnikov fire was heard coming from within the sprawling clay structure. Some of the prisoners are believed to be members of the Al-Qaeda network. “We are watching them to prevent them escaping. If they try, we will open fire,” said Muhammad Alam, spokesman for Alliance commander Atta Muhammad. “Some among them who tried to leave were bombed.”
A Taleban spokesman was quoted by the Afghan Islamic Press as saying his forces would fight US troops “to our last breath,” adding that the Taleban still controlled Kandahar and that Taleban supreme leader Mullah Muhammad Omar was in command there.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the US military Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the same briefing that Omar’s function differed from Bin Laden’s. “Omar seems to be trying to organize the fighting in the Taleban and Bin Laden on the other hand seems to be concentrating on hiding,” he said.
Rumsfeld said Omar was unlikely to surrender: “He’s a rather determined dead-ender type.... He just doesn’t feel to me like the surrendering type.”
Helicopters and C-130 planes airlifted hundreds of Marines from ships in the Arabian Sea, including the amphibious assault ship USS Peleliu, starting on Sunday, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clark said earlier. Clark also detailed what she called a “friendly fire” incident near the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif on Sunday, in which five US troops were hurt by an errant American bomb during a prison uprising.
Britain, meanwhile, took most of the 6,400 troops it had readied for service in Afghanistan off high alert yesterday, saying the situation there had stabilized. But Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon highlighted the dangers of the volatile country when he revealed that four British soldiers had been wounded there — one of them seriously.
Rumsfeld said at midday Washington time that the prison compound at Mazar-e-Sharif had not been secured. “There are hundreds of prisoners in there and some got hold of weapons and some got loose and some have escaped and some are fighting and some are penned up and air support has been called in and how long it will go on depends on how successful the opposition forces on the ground are in containing those that are still in prison and in subduing them,” Rumsfeld said.”
The so-called friendly fire incident occurred on Sunday when American forces dropped a 500-pound (226.8 kg) Joint Direct Attack Munition satellite-guided bomb near the prison, Defense Department officials said. “This is in a compound near Mazar-e-Sharif where there have been some problems with the prisoners there and in calling in close air support, a JDAM landed near some of our forces,” Clark said.
In Koenigswinter, Germany, the UN spokesman for Afghanistan said yesterday that Afghan groups must decide quickly on a security force and an interim administration, amid fears that the fall of the last Taleban stronghold of Kandahar would ignite infighting among the Alliance.
The four Afghan delegations gathering at a secluded hotel overlooking the Rhine River face intense international pressure to reach a consensus on Afghanistan’s political future, with 18 nations, including the United States and Britain, exerting influence from the corridors. Four delegations representing the Northern Alliance and ex-King Muhammad Zahir Shah as well as two groups of exiles based in Cyprus and Peshawar open the talks today on forming a transitional administration and a security force to police Afghanistan after the Taleban. With the fall of the city of Kunduz to the Northern Alliance on Sunday and fighting raging in the last Taleban stronghold of Kandahar, none of the most important warlords were at the talks.
The Northern Alliance also said that Bin Laden and Taleban chief Mullah Omar are together and “contained” in the area around the militia’s southern citadel of Kandahar. But the Alliance’s Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said the hunt for the world’s most wanted man and his Afghan protector was “not yet over” and the coming days would be crucial.
