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More U.S. troops to Afghan-Pak Border Raise Doubts of Battle
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The
U.S. has moved Apache helicopters to a U.S. Special Forces base
near the city of Khost, 20 miles from the Pakistan border.
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KHOST, Afghanistan, May 1 (News Agencies) — The United States is moving parts of more than two battalions of the 101st Airborne Division to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, providing the latest and strongest sign that a major battle is brewing in that region, a senior defense official said Tuesday, April 30, The Washington Post reported.
The deployment of what one top officer said could ultimately exceed 1,000 soldiers follows the movement into the area of several hundred British Marines who specialize in fighting in cold weather and mountains.
The United States has also moved Apache helicopters to a U.S. Special Forces base near the city of Khost, 20 miles from the Pakistan border. It is in the heart of the turbulent region where U.S. officials claim hundreds of Al-Qaeda fighters and their Taliban allies are believed to be hiding.
U.S. forces and their allies on both sides of the border are said to be acting on recent unconfirmed intelligence reports claiming that Osama bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader, and his top lieutenant Ayman Zawahiri are hiding in the tribal areas on the Pakistani side of the border not far from Khost.
But the United States is not certain of the accuracy of the reports that Bin Laden and Zawahiri have allegedly been seen in the village of Maidan, in the Waziristan area of Pakistan. Nonetheless, it is chasing down the tips, the defense official said, according to the Post.
Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a spokesman for the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for the war, disputed the number of troops being deployed, saying it was fewer than 1,000. But he declined to discuss specifics.
The U.S. moves coincide with reports from Afghan officials in the border area that the United States and its allies were readying another major operation against members of the Al-Qaeda network and Afghanistan’s Taliban militia, the Post said.
U.S. military officials on Tuesday reported two firefights in the area, in which U.S. and Australian special forces troops are said to have killed four Al-Qaeda fighters. Army Maj. Gen. Franklin L. “Buster” Hagenbeck, the U.S. ground commander in Afghanistan, said the two fights occurred northeast of Khost, about a mile from the Pakistani border.
In the first incident, Australian forces were attacked with mortar and rocket-propelled grenades, and returned fire, killing two, according to Australian military officials. In the second clash, U.S. and Australian troops ambushed fighters who were moving near Khost before dawn Tuesday, killing another two.
The operation that appears to be looming promises to be smaller and more diffuse than the offensive early March against Al-Qaeda fighters by U.S. and allied forces in the Shahikot region west of Khost.
In that battle, which the U.S. military refers to as Operation Anaconda, Al-Qaeda fighters had dug-in positions with heavy weapons, such as long-range mortars and machine guns configured to shoot down aircraft.
Cement was poured in some areas to provide firing platforms for the mortars. A communications wire ran from an entrenched position atop a 10,000-foot-high ridge to a nearby bunker serving as a command center, which was powered by a solar collector with a back-up car battery.
In the border area, by contrast, U.S. intelligence claims it has not detected massed groups of Al-Qaeda and Taliban members with prepared fighting positions. Instead, they are tracking handfuls of fighters, almost all in groups of 25 or fewer, the official said.
“I don’t think we’ll get them in a formation, like we did in Anaconda,” the senior defense official told the Post. “Given the losses they took in Anaconda, they’re not going to gather in a group like that.”
The U.S. plan along the border appears to be to launch fast-moving raids that capitalize on the army’s ability to move troops quickly by air, to fight at night and to call in airstrikes around the clock.
The official claimed the purpose of the attacks would be to drive Al-Qaeda fighters from their hiding places in towns, villages and mountain caves.
“I think they still do have a command and control structure in place,” Hagenbeck said Tuesday.
Conventional U.S. forces, such as the 101st Airborne Division units, have been given permission to cross into Pakistan, the defense official said, according to the Post. The United States already has Special Forces troops operating with the Pakistani military in Pakistan.
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