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Suspected Al-Qaeda Convoy Destroyed; Musharraf Says Bin Laden May be Dead
KABUL, Dec. 22 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A convoy destroyed by U.S. air strikes in eastern Afghanistan had opened fire on U.S. aircraft just before it was bombed, U.S. officials in Kabul said on Saturday.
Local leaders said 65 people, mainly tribal elders and Afghan soldiers en route to Kabul for the inauguration of the interim administration, were killed and demanded the new government of Hamid Karzai, sworn in on Saturday, carry out an inquiry.
Karzai said on Saturday he doubted tribal chiefs were in the convoy but said he would make checks.
"Somebody came to see me yesterday [Friday]. I was supposed to meet him today to hear a first hand account of what happened," he told his first news conference since taking office.
"And I will definitely check it out with our American friends," he said. "I don't think it's true." The first information I got was there was no such bombing. I will check it out. If they were al-Qaeda then they were not tribal chiefs."
An official in neighboring Nangarhar province told news agencies the convoy did indeed contain officials of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
One U.S. embassy official in Kabul who declined to be identified said: "We apparently had evidence that this convoy had al-Qaeda forces. We circled the convoy.
"I'm told by Centcom [Central Command] that we were fired on twice by the convoy using anti-aircraft missiles, which they took as a hostile act and proceeded to attack the convoy," he said.
The Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) said U.S. warplanes bombed a convoy of tribal elders traveling to Kabul. Locals fed the wrong information to the Pentagon, AIP said.
But U.S. General Tommy Franks, in command of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, said he thought his forces had hit the right target.
"I will tell you, having been in touch with my headquarters, that at this point we believe it was a good target," he told journalists shortly after the ceremony swearing in the new interim administration under Karzai. "The indications that I have right now tell me that this was a target that we intended to strike."
Referring to conflicting reports of civilian casualties in the war, Franks said, "This campaign in Afghanistan has been remarkable in terms of the very small amount of shooting the wrong target, the very small amount of collateral damage," he said. "And each time we receive a report like that, we investigate it."
Franks said that he also heard reports that U.S. planes came under fire.
"The reports that I received as I came in today indicated that the aircraft received fire from that convoy...and so that all has to be factored in," said Franks. He added there had been no U.S. casualties.
But Abdullah Jan, a spokesman for the shura (council) of the Nayazain tribe in Khost urged Karzai to order an inquiry, AIP said.
The victims included Maulvi Mian Jan who was traveling to Kabul at Karzai's invitation, AIP quoted him as saying.
"He was a tribal chief. There was no Talib nor any al-Qaeda fighter in our convoy. Why was it bombed?" he told AIP.
AIP said the dead included tribal elders and former Afghan commanders. It quoted its sources in the area as saying one of the dead was "commander" Mohammad Ibrahim, a brother of famous former Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani.
Haqqani fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s but switched sides to become the tribal affairs minister in the Taliban government.
A local resident told BBC that the dead included Naeem Kochi, head of the Ahmadzai tribe, a man who has changed sides frequently and had been linked with the Taliban in the past.
Fourteen vehicles in the convoy were destroyed, AIP said, quoting a member of the ruling provincial
shura, Sayed Yaqeen.
In Washington, Pentagon officials said U.S. military AC-130 gunships and Navy jet fighters attacked and destroyed a convoy believed to be carrying Taliban leadership.
The Pentagon said it hit its intended target after receiving intelligence reports.
Meanwhile, Saudi-born dissident millionaire Osama bin Laden has not been reliably sighted for the past week and U.S. forces do not know whether he is dead or alive, Franks said on Saturday.
Franks told reporters in Kabul that the hunt for the prime suspect in the deadly September 11 attacks on New York and Washington was now focused on three possibilities.
"He can be in Tora Bora or in that area dead, he can be somewhere else in Afghanistan and still alive or perhaps he may have gotten over into Pakistan," Franks said. "I think we'll hear an awful lot of speculation, but right now we don't know which of those three categories he's in."
Asked when he last had a reasonably good idea where bin Laden was, Franks said: "I would tell you that I can't say that I or someone I know has physically laid eyes on Osama bin Laden in the past week."
The hunt for bin Laden, leader of the al-Qaeda network, has concentrated on the mountainous Tora Bora area south of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan.
U.S. warplanes kept up a sustained bombardment of the area as Afghan fighters moved forward on the ground to flush al-Qaeda members, and possibly bin Laden, from a network of caves and bunkers deep underground.
Franks said the United States had taken "a good deal of intelligence data" from the caves and was continuing to analyze it for clues to bin Laden's whereabouts.
"As long as we find that we are able to get into the cave complexes...in a way that gets us what we want, which is access to the information that we think is there...then we simply stay with that," Franks said.
He said he was confident bin Laden would be found by Pakistani forces if he had slipped over the porous border with Afghanistan, but would not say whether U.S. forces would join the hunt.
"The cooperation that we have with the Pakistanis, in my view, would ensure that if he were in Pakistan, he would be picked up," Franks said.
Franks, who heads the U.S. Central Command based in Tampa, Florida, said the search for bin Laden would continue along its present course until all three possibilities had been exhausted.
"We will hear a lot about radio transmissions having been intercepted," added Franks, "and we'll receive a lot of reports that someone thought they might have seen something or someone said that someone else thought they saw something. We just look at every one of these and we decide where to look, at what intensity, based on what we see."
More U.S. troops will be sent to the Tora Bora area to help look for clues to the whereabouts of bin Laden, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday. He declined to say how many soldiers would take part.
"Whatever is needed will be sent," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference. "And it won't be just U.S., it will be coalition forces."
It is dangerous work, but "a sense of urgency" compels it, Rumsfeld said. Information gleaned from searches elsewhere inside Afghanistan has led to the arrest of "people across the world ... and undoubtedly have prevented terrorist activities," he said. He declined to elaborate.
The extra U.S. soldiers sent to search Tora Bora caves could come from several units.
There are about 2,000 U.S. Marines in southern Afghanistan, mostly in and around the Kandahar airport. Others that could be tapped for the Tora Bora mission are hundreds of Marines on several amphibious warships in the Arabian Sea, military officials said.
Army troops from the 10th Mountain Division, specially trained for cold-weather operations, could move in swiftly from their current base in Uzbekistan.
Senior defense officials said Franks proposed sending several hundred Marines and possibly a smaller number of Army troops to the Tora Bora area.
Franks is trying to sort out "the balance of missions," said one senior military officer, who noted that some troops must be kept in Kandahar to deal with detainees while others are protecting other areas.
The movement of new forces might not come for several days, said a second military officer, who like the first spoke on condition of anonymity.
Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf says he's "reasonably sure" that bin Laden has not escaped to Pakistan and that there's a "great possibility" that the al-Qaida leader is dead.
Musharraf told Chinese state television during a Friday visit in Beijing that Pakistan would hand the alleged terrorist mastermind over to the United States if he's caught.
"He's not in Pakistan, of that we are reasonably sure. But we can't be 100% sure. We have sealed the borders between Afghanistan and Pakistan," Musharraf said.
"The Tora Bora region in which he was supposed to be operating ... has about eight passes leading into Pakistan,'' Musharraf said. "We are guarding each one of these passes."
"Maybe he is dead because of all the operations that have been conducted, the bombardment of all the caves," Musharraf said. "There is a great possibility that he may have lost his life there."
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