KABUL, 2 July 2005 — US forces desperately scoured rugged Afghan mountains yesterday for a small team of soldiers missing after fierce fighting that included the shooting down of a special forces helicopter with 16 troops aboard earlier this week, US officials said.
A purported Taleban spokesman claimed to have captured one of the soldiers.
The developments further worsen the already stinging blow the US military suffered from the deaths of the 16 on the MH-47 Chinook chopper, and comes as it scrambles to deal with an insurgency that threatens three years of progress toward peace.
The US announcement was made as Afghan officials said that the Taleban killed 15 and lost 13 of their own in a fresh wave of violence in south of the country.
US military spokesman Lt. Col. Jerry O’Hara said US forces were using “every available asset” to search for the missing troops. “Until we find our guys, they are still listed as unaccounted for and everything we got in that area is oriented on finding the missing men,” he said. He declined to identify the soldiers or say how many were missing. The downed helicopter had gone into the mountains near the town of Asadabad, close to the Pakistani border, on Tuesday to “extract the soldiers,” O’Hara said. The team on the ground has been missing since the chopper was downed.
The Taleban claim to have kidnapped a soldier came from its purported spokesman, Mulla Latif Hakimi. “One high-ranking American has been captured in fighting in the same area as the helicopter went down,” he told The Associated Press.
The killings in southern Afghanistan were the latest in a stepped up campaign of militant attacks ahead of Sept. 18 parliamentary elections.
Nine elders were killed in the village of Lander in the central province of Uruzgan on Thursday night, a day after security forces killed seven guerrillas in an attack on a security post, Uruzgan Gov. Jan Mohammad Khan said.
He said the guerrillas released a 9-year-old boy to bring news of the killings and to offer to exchange the bodies of the elders and the guerrillas. “They said the elders had been cooperating with the Americans,” he said.
Early yesterday morning, guerrillas also attacked a security post in Charcheno district of Uruzgan, killing four policemen, he said, adding that five guerrillas were killed and one was captured in that incident.
In another insurgent attack on Thursday, two civilians were killed when rockets aimed at a district office landed northeast of the city of Khost, in the southeast, the province’s deputy police chief, Mohammad Zaman, said.
In the southwestern province of Helmand, one Taleban fighter was killed and another captured after trying to attack a convoy of US troops, provincial spokesman Haji Mohammad Khan said.
