U.S. Warplanes Kill Five in Afghanistan

03/23/2005

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - U.S. warplanes killed five suspected militants near the Pakistani border after guerrillas launched an overnight attack on American and Afghan military positions, officials said Wednesday.

The planes scrambled after insurgents fired at least eight rockets at a U.S. base in the southeastern province of Khost and turned rockets and guns against three border posts late Tuesday, the American military said.

“Coalition aircraft killed five insurgents,” a military statement said, adding that U.S. troops also responded with artillery fire from their base near the city of Khost. No U.S. or allied forces were hurt, it said.

Mohammed Nawab, a senior Afghan commander in Khost, told The Associated Press that U.S. helicopters had ferried ammunition to forces defending the border posts. He blamed Taliban or al-Qaida militants for the attacks and said they had come from the Pakistani side of the border.

“They also retreated in that direction,” Nawab said by telephone from Khost.

Nawab said his troops found four bodies and abandoned weapons on Wednesday morning, though Gov. Nerajuddin Pathan said five bodies were recovered, apparently the same casualties counted by the U.S. military.

In eastern Afghanistan, U.S.-led troops accidentally shot to death an Afghan boy during a search operation, the military said. The boy was killed when troops from the American-led coalition opened fire as they pursued a suspected bomb-maker in a village near Asadabad, 120 miles east of Kabul, the military said in a statement.

In another incident, a roadside bomb damaged a U.S. Humvee near the southern city of Kandahar on Tuesday, U.S. spokeswoman Lt. Cindy Moore said. The soldiers on board were unhurt.

Taliban-led rebels have maintained a stubborn insurgency along the mountainous border, despite the presence of some 17,000 American troops in Afghanistan more than three years after the former ruling militia was ousted for harboring al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

Purported Taliban leaders have threatened a fresh offensive as warmer weather melts snow blocking high passes along the Pakistani border, though U.S. commanders have insisted since successful presidential elections last year that the militants are a fading force.

On Wednesday, NATO’s top commander said Afghanistan was stable and that recent attacks were no more than “random acts of violence.”

“I don’t think we’re facing anything that remotely resembles an organized insurgency,” U.S. Marine Gen. James L. Jones said at the end of a short visit to the separate, 8,500-strong NATO security force in Afghanistan.

Jones, who discussed plans for NATO to relieve U.S.-led forces in western Afghanistan this summer with President Hamid Karzai, said he was optimistic that U.N.-sponsored parliamentary elections slated for September will also go well.

Three U.N. vehicles were damaged by explosions that killed five Afghan civilians in Kandahar last Thursday, just as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited the capital, Kabul to praise the country’s fledgling democracy.