WASHINGTON/KANDAHAR, 29 January — Afghan troops and their US advisers stormed a hospital in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar yesterday, killing six Arab gunmen of Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network in an assault lasting over nine hours. It all started before dawn with a rattle of automatic gunfire and two detonations.
"Go, Go!" an American voice was heard shouting as Afghans cleared a wing of the hospital room by room, throwing grenades followed by rapid single rounds and bursts of automatic fire. The Al-Qaeda fighters, besieged in a single, first-floor ward for the past month, ignored at least two ultimatums, refused offers to negotiate, and fought back hard.
"They were fighting to the last moment of their lives," said provincial government spokesman Khalid Pashtun, announcing the end of the operation and the death of all six Arabs at 2:00 p.m. (0930 GMT). "The Mirwais Hospital issue was finally solved. All six men were killed," he added. He said five Afghan soldiers were injured in the operation, which began around 3:00 a.m. (2230 GMT Sunday) and ended more than 11 hours later with the death of all six Arab men, who had refused to surrender.
Pashtun claimed the Americans only had a "monitoring" role but an AFP photographer who was in the hospital throughout the operation said he saw US soldiers firing their weapons. "They were carrying guns and took position around the hospital. They were shooting at the hospital, retaliating to firing from the Arabs," the photographer said.
"Some of them went inside with the local Afghan soldiers when the final assault was launched." He said after the US and Afghan forces entered the building there was a series of grenade explosions. Minutes later, people who were trapped in other parts of the hospital were told it was safe to leave.
Hospital staff and patients were still in the building at the time of the raid but the Arabs, who were armed with guns and grenades, had been isolated in a separate wing.
The suspected Al-Qaeda militants were injured in the US bombing around Kandahar last year and had been holed up in the Mirwais Hospital since the Taleban evacuated their former stronghold in December.
They had refused to give up, fearing they would be handed over to American forces, and had managed to gain access to water despite orders from the local authorities to cut supplies. "We had conducted negotiations with them for one and a half months and we promised them time and again that their lives would be saved if they surrendered," Pashtun told AFP. Afghan intelligence officer Nasratullah Nasrat said US soldiers had blocked off the streets around the hospital, where a fire had broken out during the raid.
The raid came as Afghan leader Hamid Karzai was in Washington to confer with President George W. Bush, and international troops and economic advisers poured into Afghanistan hoping to jump-start efforts to rebuild the country.
Karzai said on NBC television that international aid was crucial to preventing the return of terrorists to his country, reeling from more than two decades of conflict and three years of drought.
"The contribution of financial assistance by the United States and the rest of the world is significant in preventing the return of bad people to Afghanistan or the return of terrorism to Afghanistan," he said. Kabul diplomats said Karzai, in his talks with Bush, had to balance support for the anti-terror campaign with increasing Afghan concern about the number of civilians being killed by US bombs despite the ousting of the Taleban.
Meanwhile, the reported discovery of several French citizens among the 158 Al-Qaeda and Taleban prisoners being held in the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay seems likely to fuel the international criticism leveled at Washington for its treatment of combatants captured in Afghanistan.
