http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,5635...

June 27, 2002
AP

KABUL, Afghanistan — About 100 U.S. soldiers, accompanied by 50 Afghan fighters, are scouring the rugged mountains in an area where a former Taliban official says Usama bin Laden maintained several hide-outs.

The little-publicized operation is underway in Kunar province, north of Jalalabad along the Pakistan border, Afghan and U.S. officials said. First word of the operation came Tuesday, when U.S. officials at Bagram air base said American forces came under mortar fire in Kunar but suffered no casualties.

``The Americans are here in Kunar ... but I can't say for sure whether there are Al Qaeda here,'' said local government spokesman Saeed Mohammed Safi, who provided the number of troops involved.

``We have a lot of mountains and gorges and forests where (Al Qaeda) can hide. But I haven't seen any,'' he said Wednesday.

In Washington, U.S. officials said the operation was launched because of clues that important Al Qaeda or Taliban figures may be hiding in the area. They would not elaborate.

However, a former Taliban security official, who spoke to The Associated Press last spring on condition of anonymity, said he had accompanied bin Laden to his hide-outs in the mountains of Kunar province.

The official said that in one camp, Al Qaeda maintained five satellite dishes that were camouflaged on a mountainside. While visiting the camp, the official said he heard conversations by satellite telephone in French and Arabic.

Most of the known Al Qaeda camps are believed to be in six Afghan provinces: Kunar, Nangarhar, Logar and Paktia provinces in the east, and Kandahar and Helmand provinces in the south.

When the Taliban fled Jalalabad, the provincial capital of neighboring Nangarhar province, they took with them 2,500 Arabs, according to Maulvi Towha, the Taliban's security chief there.

In an interview with AP in neighboring Pakistan, Towha — who presided over the destruction of the giant statues of Buddha of Bamiyan — said some of the Arab fighters headed northeast toward Kunar and others fled southeastward toward Tora Bora. Towha said bin Laden was not among them.

Some of the Arabs who headed north toward Kunar were killed in a gunbattle with anti-Taliban Afghans. Towha said that hundreds of others escaped into the mountains and some slipped across the border into Pakistan into a tribal area controlled by a radical Islamic cleric, Sufi Mohammed, who sent thousands of fighters to Afghanistan after the U.S.-led assault began on Oct. 7.

The forbidding mountains of Kunar have a history as a haven for militants. Pakistan's intelligence service trained Kashmiri militants in the area when former president Burhanuddin Rabbani ruled in Kabul in the mid-1990s, according to a former intelligence chief, Javed Nasir.

Safi said that the Kashmiri militant group Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, banned by Pakistan's President Gen. Pervez Musharraf last January, maintained training camps in Kunar after the Taliban drove Rabbani's government from Kabul in 1996.

The current governor of Kunar, Haji Jan Dad, hid in the mountains during the Taliban's rule, emerging only after the hardline militia collapsed last year after U.S. airstrikes and ground attacks by the northern alliance.

Safi said the area contains bunkers built during the war against the Soviets in the 1980s ``but there are no big caves because the mountains are very high and there are so many trees that there is no need for caves, everything can be hidden in the trees and defended.''

According to former guerrilla fighters, who didn't want to be identified by name, many Arab fighters moved to the area because it was a stronghold of former anti-communist rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar — now on the U.S. wanted list.

One of Hekmatyar's commanders, Kashmir Khan, still has a strong following in Kunar, Safi said. Other former guerrillas said that there were reports that Hekmatyar was in Kunar several weeks ago before moving to the southwest.

Kunar also attracted fighters from the Middle East because of the presence of another major commander from the Soviet war, Jamil-ur-Rahman. He is a follower of the Wahabbi sect of Islam, which is the main brand of the religion in Saudi Arabia.

Rahman later clashed with the many Arabs living in Kunar as they began to assert their authority following the collapse of Afghanistan's communist regime in 1992. Rahman died in 1994, and Safi said he was assassinated by disgruntled Arabs in Pakistan's border city of Peshawar.