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<A HREF="http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe";>http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe</A> US launches commandos on 2d raid Earlier attack's details emerge By John Donnolley and Robert Schlesinger, Globe Staff, 10/21/2001 WASHINGTON US commandos last night again slipped into Afghanistan on a secret mission following heated battles the night before between Army Ranger special forces and Taliban troops in the southern part of the country, US officials said. A Defense Department official declined to give any details on the new invasion force, citing the need to protect the safety of the troops, but the new mission signaled that the special operation forces have become an integral part of the US-led military operation, now two weeks old. The latest raid followed closely an airborne assault near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar that Pentagon officials described in some detail yesterday. The new phase of ground fighting produced the first acknowledged US combat fatalities as two soldiers were killed and three injured when their UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, which was part of the covert mission, crashed in neighboring Pakistan, said General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For that mission, officials said, two groups totalling well over 100 special forces landed nearly simultaneously during the night at locations far apart one at an airfield ''a considerable distance'' southwest of Kandahar and the other near Kandahar at a large compound that served as one of the homes of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader. While US officials labeled their mission a success especially in the collection of intelligence material from Omar's compound they admitted that no leader of the Taliban or Osama bin Laden's network, Al Qaeda, has been found. That is the primary goal of the mission. Myers said the special forces ''attacked and destroyed targets,'' but gave no details. During the fighting, small US teams sneaked into buildings and pulled out ''lots and lots'' of intelligence, a US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. A former senior US official with close ties to military intelligence said that most of the Army Rangers battled the Taliban ''in a pretty big fight, creating a diversion that allowed the other guys to go in quietly. Those small teams walked out with a lot of stuff that they will want to sit down and look at closely.'' The Pentagon gave the public a limited and sanitized glimpse of the night warriors, playing at its briefing a handful of grainy, home-movie-quality videos of special operations forces their faces carefully not shown wearing backpacks and boarding a C-130 aircraft; parachuting out of the aircraft; moving from room to room, apparently at an unnamed airfield barracks; and collecting a small pile of rocket-propelled grenades, a machine gun, and ammunition, which they later destroyed. ''We accomplished our objectives,'' Myers said. ''One of the messages should be that we are capable of, at a time of our choosing, conducting the kind of operations we want to conduct.'' Added the former senior US official: ''They were telling the Taliban, it's not like the Russians when they were there. We operate at night; the Russians never operated at night.'' Myers said the special forces ''met resistance'' at both locations, adding, ''I guess you could characterize it as light. ... For those experiencing it, of course, it was probably not light.'' He said there were no US deaths in that fighting, and said Taliban troops suffered an unknown number of casualties. Two Army Rangers parachuting into one of the sites were injured upon landing. As the campaign continues to target Al Qaeda, the United States and its allies say they are still intercepting communications among bin Laden and his associates suggesting that more attacks are coming, the New York Times reported today. Intelligence officials in six countries told the newspaper that they were unsure where to expect the attacks or in what form they might come. But they said their intercepts convinced them that bin Laden had expected the United States to launch military operations in Afghanistan and was prepared to launch counterattacks. The nation's senior military officer said it would be wrong to conclude that the United States was now entering a phase in the campaign where most of the fighting would occur on the ground. Instead, he said, the United States was now prepared to use all its various weapons in the war. One key part of that, he said, would be the special forces. ''They are now refitting and repositioning for potential future operations,'' Myers said. Underscoring the various methods of attack, however, Myers reported that, while the two ground operations were underway late Friday, about 100 strike aircraft hit sites in 15 ''target areas,'' including antiaircraft sites, ammunition and vehicle storage depots, and military training facilities. Ninety of the aircraft were carrier-based, with 10 to 12 others long-range bombers and the Air Force's AC-130U gunship. The United States also flew four humanitarian missions Friday, dropping about 68,000 rations of food in western Afghanistan in areas under the control of the Northern Alliance, which is battling the Taliban along several fronts. ''I wouldn't predict what we will be using for the preponderance of the time in the weeks and months ahead,'' said Navy Rear Admiral Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, in an interview. ''We will pick and choose what will have the best capabilities based on the options.'' In China, during an Asia-Pacific economic conference, President Bush did not comment directly on the raid. He said he was satisfied that the military was achieving its objective of destroying terrorist hide-outs. ''We are slowly but surely encircling the terrorists so that we can bring them to justice,'' Bush said in Shanghai. He said he grieved for the dead soldiers, who ''died in a cause that is just and right.'' A spokesman for the Taliban Embassy in Islamabad said the American helicopter that crashed in Pakistan was downed by Taliban fighters. But Myers said the allegation was ''absolutely false.'' ''We have for sure shot down the US helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade when it was taking off on the night of the attack,'' Education Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi told Reuters, referring to Friday's midnight strike by US special forces. ''We believe that between 20 or 25 of the American fighters have perished in the incident.'' US officials would not give the exact locations of the two sites attacked late Friday. Omar is known to have a compound under construction on the northern outskirts of Kandahar, a home in the city, and another home about 20 miles west of Kandahar in the village of Meivand. The compound north of Kandahar includes several buildings, and aid officials have said it has suffered damage from bombs during the war. Myers said the site invaded by the US forces on Friday had not suffered bomb damage. In the video shown by the Pentagon, US soldiers are seen going from room to room in a concrete building at what was described as a building at an airfield. Myers said it was not the Kandahar airport, and a senior defense official said it was a long distance southwest of Kandahar. There is an airfield at Laskahgar, about 60 miles southwest of Kandahar, but it has only one building, a mud hut. Farther west are two other airfields: Nimroz Zarang on the Iranian border to the southwest, and Sindand to the northwest. Sindand is a military airstrip, and thus the more likely target, analysts said, but it did not seem to be in the right geographical location. Landing at Nimroz Zarang, which could be in the right area, would have been extremely sensitive because it sits on the Iranian border. One relief official, who works in Afghanistan but has been in Pakistan since the Sept. 11 air attacks on New York and Washington, expressed surprise yesterday that the US special forces apparently parachuted into the airfield. ''I would have thought they would go to an airfield by foot or by helicopter,'' the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. ''That's because it is heavily mined everywhere around the airfields, and so it is an extremely high-risk mission.'' This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 10/21/2001. � <A HREF="http://www.boston.com/globe/search/copyright.html";>Copyright</A> 2001 Globe Newspaper Company. -------------------------------------------------- Get more bang for your buck with TopOffers! It's the best bargains, bar none! 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