US forces kill 18 Afghan rebels in heavy fighting

ABOUT 200 US special forces and their allies were battling rebels in southeast Afghanistan yesterday in the heaviest fighting since Operation Anaconda nine months ago.

At least 18 of the rebel fighters were killed. There were no coalition casualties, a US military official said.

“It is the largest concentration of enemy forces since Operation Anaconda,” US military spokesman Roger King confirmed at Bagram Air Base.

“We have had reports of various numbers of armed men, groups of people trying to gather in order to carry out attacks on the coalition.”

The group of about 80 rebels are thought to be aligned to renegade leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

American B-1 bombers, F-16s and AC-130 gunships were attacking enemy positions, including deep caves, Mr King said.

The fighting, about 15 miles north of Spinboldak and near the Pakistani border, was triggered by a small shoot-out between US special forces and armed attackers as the Americans and their Afghan government allies were working to clear a compound.

One of the attackers was killed, one injured and one detained, Mr King said. He said the detained suspect later said a large group of armed men had massed in the mountains.

“Our intelligence leads us to believe that they are most closely aligned with the Hezb-e-Islami movement, which is Hekmatyar’s military arm,” Mr King said. “We have had reports over several months that he has been attempting to consolidate with remnants of al-Qaida and Taliban.”

Hekmatyar was a key guerrilla commander during the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan. In the civil war that paved the way for the Taliban take-over, Hekmatyar’s men attacked the capital Kabul with daily rocket barrages.

He lived in exile in Iran during the five years of Taliban rule, and returned after US-led forces kicked out the hardline militia. Reports that Hekmatyar was training suicide squads to target American and government forces surfaced in September, when one of Hekmatyar’s military commanders, Salauddin Safi, said some Taliban had formed an alliance with Hekmatyar’s followers called Lashkar Fedayan-e-Islami, or the Islamic Martyrs Brigade.