Hundreds of US soldiers supported by bombers and attack helicopters were last night locked in their most serious battle in Afghanistan for nearly a year.
At least 18 rebel fighters, thought to be loyal to the Islamist warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, were killed in a US-led assault on their mountaintop hideout 24 kilometes north of Spin Boldak, a small border town in southern Afghanistan.
American soldiers, supported by troops from the new Afghan government, were still fighting in the Adi Ghar mountains more than 12 hours after the encounter began. US forces called in B-1 bombers, AC-130 Spectre gunships and Apache attack helicopters for support. A US military representative said F-16 fighters from an unnamed European country were also involved in the battle.
Yesterday Norway said it had participated in the attack — the first time its air force had gone into battle since the second world war.
The fighting marked the biggest US offensive in Afghanistan since Operation Anaconda, which was fought in the mountains of Shah-i-Kot, in south-eastern Afghanistan, last March.
Eight American soldiers were killed in that attack when they came up against heavier than expected opposition from Taliban and al-Qaeda loyalists.
Yesterday’s battle began when a US special forces team on patrol near Spin Boldak came under fire as it searched a large residential compound. The team shot dead one attacker, wounded one and caught another. He told them that 80 more rebels were hiding in the mountains nearby.
Apache helicopters were sent to search the mountains and were fired on. They promptly called in ground and air support.
”It’s without a doubt the largest concentration of enemy forces that we’ve come across since Operation Anaconda,” Colonel Roger King, a US army representative said at the Bagram air base, the US military headquarters in Afghanistan. He said the fighting could last a ”considerable period of time” because of the difficult mountainous terrain.
He said US and allied aircraft had dropped 19 900kg bombs and two guided 220kg bombs near a group of caves in the mountains. ”There were repeated gun engagements by the AC-130 and the AH-64 Apaches,” he said.
It was unclear how many rebel fighters the US troops faced. At least 350 troops from special forces, the 82nd airborne division and the Afghan government are involved in the operation and reinforcements were being sent.
The fighting comes after weeks of concern that fighters led by Hekmatyar were rallying in Afghanistan in an attempt to challenge the fragile, western-backed government of Hamid Karzai.
Col King said there were indications that Hekmatyar was trying to win support from the remnants of the Taliban regime and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.
”We’ve had reports of various numbers of armed men, groups of people trying to gather in order to carry out attacks on the coalition,” he said. ”We’ve been actively engaged in trying to develop intelligence that would lead us to a precise location and yesterday we did.”
Among the rebels holed up in the mountains are believed to be Hafiz Abdul Majeed, the former Taliban police chief in the southern city of Kandahar, and another Taliban military commander, Hafiz Abdur Raheem.
Hekmatyar, a former Afghan prime minister, is one of the most hardline warlords to have emerged from the 1980s war against the Soviet occupation. An extreme Islamist, he was always a favourite of Pakistan’s military intelligence services and as a result received a large slice of the millions of dollars the CIA funnelled into the Afghan jihad.
But his Hezb-i-Islami party was responsible for much of the death and destruction in Kabul when rival mojahedin factions turned on each other after the Soviet withdrawal. His face now appears alongside that of Bin Laden and the former Taliban leader Mullah Omar on wanted posters dropped by US planes over Afghanistan.
Last month Hekmatyar, who is believed to be hiding in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar, issued a chilling message, distributed throughout the Afghan and Pakistani border area, calling for a war against the US military and President Karzai’s government.
”Hezb-i-Islami will fight our jihad until foreign troops are gone from Afghanistan and the Afghans have set up an Islamic government,” it read. Pakistan’s intelligence service is understood to have remained in contact with its former protege.
Hekmatyar, a Pashtun born in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, appears to represent one of the most serious challenges to the Kabul government. Although his methods are brutal, he is likely to find support among some in the Pashtun people of the south who feel excluded by the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic minorities that make up the Kabul government. – Guardian Unlimited Â