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Afghans Protest U.S. Capture Of Officials
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| Afghanistan Interim leader Hamid Karzai next to U.S. President George W. Bush during press conference |
KABUL, Jan. 30 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Afghan authorities were seeking explanations from the U.S. military over the holding of 27 prisoners seized last week in a Special Forces raid, news agencies reported.
The Afghans say those taken into custody include anti-Taliban officials loyal to interim leader Hamid Karzai's new government, among them the district police chief, his deputy and members of the district council.
The pre-dawn raid has emerged as one of the most controversial operations since the U.S. military shifted gears from forcing the collapse of the Taliban regime to the hunt for surviving pockets of Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
The Pentagon insists that Special Forces attacked a legitimate military target in the raid on an ammunition dump that intelligence analysts claimed Al-Qaeda or Taliban forces were allegedly using.
U.S. troops killed 15 or 16 people and took 27 others prisoner after gunmen opened fire on them, the Pentagon said. One American soldier was wounded in the ankle.
Local Afghans have insisted that by the time the Special Forces arrived, Taliban renegades had handed over the weapons to pro-government figures, some of whom were among the dead.
A spokesman for Governor Gul Agha in the southern city of Kandahar said Tuesday, January 29, that the U.S. military had promised to begin releasing some of the detainees in a few days. At the U.S. base in Kandahar, Army spokesman, Capt. Tony Rivers, declined comment.
Yusuf Pashtun, Agha's spokesman, said the Americans had been asked for "clarification" of the detainees' status and the reasons they were being held.
Karzai says he will send a delegation to investigate the raid, which occurred in Uruzgan province, where he organized resistance to the Taliban before the movement collapsed last year, following intense U.S. bombing and attacks by the northern alliance.
Wearing his trademark green cape, the Afghan leader was a guest of honor in Washington and was applauded by Congress as he sat next to first lady, Laura Bush, for the president's State of the Union speech.
Bush said that tens of thousands of what he described as "ticking time bombs, set to go off" still threaten the United States, and promised to stalk them across the globe.
Bush pledged to push the so-called war on terrorism beyond Afghanistan to a dozen countries that he claimed harbor terrorist camps. He also warned of "an axis of evil" of nations like North Korea, Iran and Iraq, and said the United States would not allow them to threaten the world with weapons of mass destruction.
Earlier, testing themes for the speech, White House officials floated a figure that as many as 100,000 so-called terrorists had trained in Afghanistan - far more than previously estimated. They later backed off, and Bush settled on "tens of thousands."
"Al-Qaeda has never had that kind of strength," said Stanley Bedlington, a former CIA terrorism analyst.
Karzai said that he will rebuild Afghanistan by drawing armed men loyal to regional leaders into a national army, then giving them labor-intensive work like building highways. But Karzai insisted that Afghanistan could only begin to recover with immediate cash assistance.
In a sign of how dire the economy is after 23 years of war, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Tuesday that the government may have to adopt the U.S. dollar as a currency until a new version of the Afghani, its own currency, can be introduced.
Warren Coats, assistant director of the IMF's monetary and exchange affairs department, said decisions need to be made in days about how to proceed. Reintroduction of the Afghani could take between two and three years. "The economy has to function between now and a new currency," Coats said.
The Afghani depreciated fast Wednesday after news reached money changers in Peshawar, a Pakistan border city. The value of one U.S. dollar jumped to 50,000 Afghanis from 30,000 Tuesday.
Meanwhile, six Al-Qaeda fighters were buried Tuesday at Kandahar's Arab Cemetery, where a few mourners honored them as martyrs a day after they were killed in an attack by U.S. Special Forces in the wing of a hospital.
The fighters -- believed to be from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Algeria -- were brought to the hospital shortly before the Taliban and Al-Qaeda abandoned Kandahar on December 7. They were reportedly armed with guns and explosives and threatened to blow themselves up to avoid arrest.
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