American Forces Blow Up Afghan Caves

June 3, 2002

BAGRAM, Afghanistan  — Troops from the Army's 101st Airborne division demolished four guerrilla cave hideouts near the Pakistani border on Sunday, a U.S. military spokesman said, and in another incident, a man who pointed a weapon at American personnel was killed. 

Col. Roger King said Monday that about 110 soldiers swept the area southeast of Jalalabad searching for enemy fighters, but found none. They did find the cave complexes, which may have been used by Al Qaeda or the Taliban at some point and were probably used by Afghan mujahedeen in earlier conflicts. 

The troops searched the cave complexes for intelligence information, King said, and then blew up the entrances. No weapons were found. 

"One cave appeared to have been used as a hospital in the past," he said, though not recently. Although he said he did not know what sparked the search, King suggested that the area had been on a list of suspected sites for investigation. 

"We have a variety of places that are identified for future operations and we take them as we get to them," he said. 

Elsewhere, U.S. special forces outside the village of Lwara, near Khost, killed an armed man who had been observing their position Sunday night, King said. The man pointed an AK-47 assault rifle at the troops as they approached him, so they opened fire on him, King said. 

Last week, four rockets were fired at U.S. special forces near Lwara, exploding about half a mile away without causing any casualties. 

In the eastern province of Nangarhar, helicopter gunships and B-52s patrolled overhead Sunday as a combined force that included about 200 Afghans combed a military base said to have been set up with funds provided by Usama bin Laden. They then moved on toward Torkham, a post on the Pakistani border. 

The al-Aqsa base, on the main road from Jalalabad to the border, was once a stronghold of warlord Abdur Rasool Sayyaf, a former deputy prime minister of the Northern Alliance who has been a critic of the U.N.-installed interim government in Afghanistan. 

An ethnic Pashtun, Sayyaf was interior minister in the government of former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was ousted by the Taliban. 

An Afghan commander said that after the fall of Tora Bora, a major cave complex in the east that was destroyed in one of the largest U.S. offensives in Afghanistan, U.S. officials believe bin Laden might have sought refuge in one of the cave complexes set up by three close allies, all since killed in separate incidents. 

The bin Laden allies — Fazal Haq Mujahid and men known as Commander Saznoor and Engineer Mahmood — were instrumental in bringing the Saudi exile to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1995. All three earlier fought alongside him as the mujahedeen battled Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s. 

U.S. special forces have been scouring the region near the Pakistani border for months, looking for al Qaeda or Taliban fighters thought to be infiltrating from Pakistan. 

Conventional forces, like the 101st Airborne, have deployed only occasionally to help in the search. Since last week, 500 British troops have been searching an area further south near the town of Khost in a sweep code-named Operation Buzzard. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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