US troops comb Afghan villages, caves for Taliban

Thousands of US and Afghan soldiers combed mountain caves and searched houses in southern Afghanistan yesterday on the second day of a major military operation against Taliban rebels, Afghan officials said.

"Operation Valiant Strike" was launched in the Samigar mountains of southeastern Afghanistan on Thursday morning, less than an hour before the first US air strikes on Iraq.

Afghan officials and military commanders said the Americans had arrested 12 people, including members of Afghanistan's former Taliban regime and renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami movement.

But US military spokesman Colonel Roger King denied having made contact with "enemy forces", who he described as supporters of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda movement. He said search operations were still getting under way over "a pretty large area".

"There are villages in the low ground, there are caves in the high ground, and (US forces) will be doing a systematic covering of the area of operations," King told reporters at the US military's headquarters at Bagram air base, north of Kabul.

The latest operation is centred on a series of villages and cave complexes about 100 kilometres east of Kandahar close to the Pakistani border, including the districts of Maruf, Arghistan and Shin Naray. Pakistani forces sealed their side of the border.

Afghan officials in the nearest major town of Spin Boldak and in the village of Maruf said the Americans had made 12 arrests.

"The operation continues and we have arrested about 12 of the enemy's soldiers, while the rest seem to have fled," Abdul Razzaq, commander of the Afghan border force in the nearest main town of Spin Boldak told Reuters.

Fox News Channel, whose correspondent is accompanying the US forces, also showed images on Thursday of several turbanned men bound and on the ground after a raid on one village.

Observers say the latest US operation appears aimed at sending Afghan rebels a message that the US army will not be distracted by war in Iraq.

But the commander of coalition forces, US Lieutenant-General Dan McNeill said the timing was a coincidence.

"It is part of an ongoing plan we have to capture, kill what's left of the terrorists and those who support terrorism efforts," McNeill told Reuters in an interview.

King said he saw no link between the start of the war in Iraq and a series of rocket attacks on three US bases in southern and eastern Afghanistan on Thursday night. A total of 13 rockets were fired, but there were no injuries.

"It was probably the most rockets launched during one evening in two and a half months," King said, but added: "It wasn't anything nationwide and I wouldn't make it anything more than it is."

King says Operation Valiant Strike involves about 1,000 US troops in total, with air support provided by Chinook, Blackhawk and Apache helicopters.

Spin Boldak deputy commissioner Fazal Din Agha said the sweep also involved 3,000 Afghan government soldiers. He said air strikes had been called in on Shin Naray district on Thursday.

"US soldiers are carrying out house-to-house searches here," said Gul Mohammad, senior district official in Maruf.

In Maruf, security chief Abdul Rasheed Khan said officials believed they were dealing with the same group of about 50 rebels who escaped a similar US operation in the Adi Ghar mountains south of Kandahar in late January.

Commanded by former Taliban and Hezb-e-Islami commander Hafiz Abdur Raheem, the group has been blamed for a series of rocket attacks and explosions in the southern city of Kandahar in the past two months. More than 25 people died in the attacks.

Thousands of US and allied troops are searching Afghanistan for Osama bin Laden and members of his al Qaeda network, prime suspects in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, as well as leaders of the Taliban regime that sheltered them.

There is mounting evidence that Hekmatyar, a former mujahideen leader who fought Soviet rule in the 1980s before briefly becoming prime minister, has formed a strategic alliance with Taliban remnants against US forces in Afghanistan.