WASHINGTON (REUTERS) — Several hundred U.S. Marines landed in southern Afghanistan near the last major Taliban stronghold of Kandahar and more troops would follow in the next few days, U.S. defense officials said Sunday.
The officials, who did not want to be identified, said the Marines, from U.S. aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea, were establishing a security perimeter at Kandahar airport.
“Several hundred Marines have moved to Kandahar airbase and are setting up a perimeter,” one senior defense official said. “More (Marines) will move there in the next several days.”
“It will give us a variety of options,” the official added.
Tribal officials in Pakistan told Reuters the Marines were shipped in by waves in helicopters in a dramatic new development in a war the United States has so far conducted almost entirely from the air.
The troops, who arrived under cover of darkness, swiftly set up communications antennae.
The arrival of the Marines, the United States’ elite ground attack troops, heralded a final push to take Kandahar, power base of Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and last bastion of the movement after its northern redoubt of Kunduz crumbled before a Northern Alliance advance Sunday.
MARINES AND HELICOPTERS
After tribal fighters seized control of the airport southeast of Kandahar at about 6 p.m. Sunday, a stream of U.S. helicopters began landing, said Mohammad Anwar, spokesman for Gud Fida Mohammad, a commander of the Achakzai tribe that took the airport.
Some helicopters were described as Chinooks bringing in armored vehicles, the first such U.S. armor to land in Afghanistan since the United States launched its attacks Oct. 7 in pursuit of Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect in the Sept. 11 suicide plane attacks on the United States.
In what appeared to be the start of the death throes of the Taliban, U.S. warplanes had to be called in to crush a revolt by foreign Taliban prisoners at a mud-walled fort in northern Afghanistan, U.S. defense officials said.
A Time magazine correspondent reported from the scene outside Mazar-i-Sharif that at least one American, whom he identified as “Mike” and said belonged to U.S. special operations forces, was missing and presumed dead after prisoners began firing smuggled weapons.
U.S. television networks ABC and NBC said the man was believed to be a CIA operative rather than a member of the military.
NO COMMENT FROM CIA
CIA spokesman Tom Crispell said the spy agency — which is reportedly running paramilitary units in Afghanistan made up chiefly of non-uniformed U.S. veterans — declined to comment on whether any of its operatives or contractors had been injured or killed in the revolt.
If the man was confirmed as a soldier, it would be the first known U.S. combat death in Afghanistan since Washington began attacking Taliban forces.
“There were two American soldiers inside the fort: one of whom was disarmed and killed — he was called Mike — and another was also in trouble,” Time correspondent Alex Perry said on the magazine’s website.
He said U.S. forces mounted a rescue operation after prisoners grabbed weapons from an armory in the fort. The second American’s fate was not immediately known, Perry said.
The Pentagon said it knew of no U.S. military casualties from the uprising near Mazar-i-Sharif, west of Kunduz, the Taliban’s last northern stronghold.
The Central Command, which is running the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan, declined to rule out the possibility that CIA operatives or other non-uniformed U.S. government personnel or contractors might have been hurt or killed in the vast 19th century citadel.
REVOLT QUELLED
“I can’t speak for anybody but the U.S. military,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. David Culler, a spokesman at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida.
About 500 prisoners linked to the al Qaeda network grabbed Kalashnikov rifles, machine guns and grenades and battled their Northern Alliance guards in the fort, a Reuters witness said.
Northern Alliance commander Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum mustered about 500 of his troops to counterattack the foreign fighters, “and we provided support via airstrikes,” said a Pentagon spokesman, Army Lt. Col. Dan Stoneking.
Another defense official, who declined to be identified, said the non-Afghan Taliban fighters had held the southern part of the complex before the AC-130 gunships and the Black Hawk helicopters helped the Northern Alliance restore control.
About 600 defenders of the northern town of Kunduz gave themselves up Saturday to Dostum and had been taken to his vast fortress headquarters near Mazar-i-Sharif.
Witnesses said many were killed and wounded in at least four hours of fighting between Alliance fighters and the prisoners.
Journalists, including two from Reuters, Red Cross officials and two unidentified Americans were trapped inside the fort for several hours. Most escaped by climbing down a 65-foot outer wall as bullets whizzed around them.
A U.S. observer in the area said some 40 U.S. special forces troops had reached the fort but could not get inside because of the heavy fighting.
An unknown number of foreign volunteers, believed to include many Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens, have been fighting alongside thousands of Taliban troops under siege in Kunduz, the radical militia’s last enclave in northern Afghanistan.
