REUTERS — Elite U.S. troops attacked two guerrilla compounds in southern Afghanistan Thursday, killing up to 15 Taliban fighters and capturing 27 others, Pentagon officials said. One U.S. soldier was wounded.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the special forces strike north of Kandahar showed that pockets of resistance remained in the country despite the United States-led rout of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda group and the former Taliban government.
Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, refused to discuss numbers killed in the pre-dawn raid, but Myers said 27 Taliban were captured and that a U.S. special forces soldier was wounded in the ankle.
Other Pentagon officials, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters that as many as 15 Afghan Taliban fighters had been killed.
According to Rumsfeld, diehard supporters of al Qaeda and Taliban are fighting on in a number of places in Afghanistan. “We are going to pursue them … and we are going to keep at them until we get them,” said Rumsfield.
“We’re doing it systematically, and I think you can expect that it will continue for some period of time.”
The latest action flared early in the day 60 miles (96 km) north of Kandahar, officials said.
“This would never be described as a walk in the park. Any firefight is intense,” Myers said in response to questions by reporters.
The general said intelligence information before the raid indicated that the two compounds might have been used by al-Qaeda leadership, but that they instead had apparently been used by Taliban leaders.
Myers added there was no immediate indication that Taliban leaders such as fugitive supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar had been killed or captured.
The U.S. special forces soldier wounded in the action had been evacuated, he said.
The United States launched its war in Afghanistan in October in response to Sept. 11 attacks on Washington and New York which killed more than 3,000 people.
The Taliban have been driven from power and U.S. forces are now hunting fugitive Osama bin Laden, accused by Washington of masterminding the September attacks.
The U.S. military’s bombing campaign has come to a virtual halt in Afghanistan over the past two weeks, but American warplanes continue to fly the skies over the war-shattered country looking for “targets of opportunity.”
Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials also said in recent weeks that the focus of the U.S. military campaign has shifted to ground operations to root al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters out of hiding places and searching caves and tunnels for intelligence information in the U.S. war on terrorism.
