| http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=288042002
Al-Qaeda dead have vanished Rory McCarthy In Shahikot SENIOR Afghan commanders yesterday raised questions about the success of the intense 12-day US military operation in the mountains at Shahikot when they admitted that hundreds of al-Qaeda and Taleban fighters escaped the battle. US military officials have repeatedly said they killed at least 500 fighters in their bombing campaign and ground operations, but yesterday, in the village of Shahikot - the heart of the battle - there was little evidence to match their claims. Three badly disfigured bodies lay by deep craters to the side of the village. One man, wearing camouflage trousers and boots, lay twisted on his side, a thin, silver ring still on his finger. The two other bodies were burnt beyond recognition. Further on, surrounded by minefields, the handful of mud-hut compounds which made up the village had been torn to rubble by days of heavy pounding from B52 and B1 bombers. But nearly all the Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters appeared to have fled the area. Most of the caves in the mountains appeared to have been small bunkers built years before the Taleban emerged and which have now been obliterated by the bombing. General Zia Lodin, the Afghan commander who ran the operation with US troops, said his men had found just ten bodies on the steep mountain slopes. US officials said they took around 20 prisoners. "Some of the bodies may be in the caves. It is difficult to tell because they are completely covered over," Gen Zia said, as he rode through the valleys in a convoy of Afghan troops and heavily-armed US soldiers. Although commanders insisted from the start of the campaign that the snow-covered craggy slopes were surrounded, Gen Zia admitted that there had been at least one escape route for the trapped fighters. "One way was open and maybe some of them escaped that way. Some of them escaped, some of them were killed and maybe now they are losing their morale," he said. One known escape route from Shahikot runs through deep valleys into the district of Orgun, close to the border with Pakistan’s tribal agencies. Yesterday US special forces troops, with thick beards ragged with weeks of growth, patrolled through the village searching for stragglers. "Right now this is still a battlefield," said one soldier, who wore a pair of dark ski goggles in the brilliant sunshine. B52 bombers circled overhead and clear-up operations are expected to continue for several days. Yet Mohammad Ismail, the commander in charge of operations at the nearby town of Gardez, said hundreds of Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters had managed to slip out from Shahikot during the attack. "It is a large area and we were not able to surround them. It is too big an area," he said. "We would need thousands and thousands of troops to do it. There is no one left in the area now, they have fled." |
