Hundreds of Marines land near Kandahar

Hundreds of US Marines have landed near the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, as American air strikes helped subdue an uprising by Taliban prisoners of war at a fortress in the north.

The Marines, numbering in the ‘‘low hundreds’’, were to be followed by several hundred more from Navy ships in the Arabian Sea, a senior US defence official said last night.

The official, who would not be named, said the Marines landed by helicopter south west of Kandahar, and that additional Marines were to arrive by C-130 transport aircraft.

The official would not discuss the Marines’ intended mission, except to say they would perform ‘‘a variety of functions’’ and may number more than 1,000 within a few days.

Kandahar is the last major Taliban stronghold against opposition uprisings throughout the country.

Hundreds of Taliban prisoners were killed in the prison uprising near Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, but US military forces were all accounted for, Pentagon officials said.

A US government official said a Central Intelligence Agency operative was wounded in the uprising.

The US Central Command, which oversees the war in Afghanistan, declined to say if US forces were in the fortress when the fighting broke out.

But a German television crew at the scene of the fight taped a US special forces soldier calling in US air strikes on the fortress near the city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Another US official said two or three US soldiers were involved and had called in air strikes.

Tom Crispell, a spokesman for the CIA, which has operatives working with anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan, said the agency had no comment on the operation.

The Taliban fighters, who had been captured near the militia’s last northern stronghold of Kunduz, had smuggled in weapons and tried to fight their way out of the fortress, said Pentagon spokesman Lt Col Dan Stoneking.

Both Central Command spokesman Lt Cmdr Dave Culler and Stoneking said US aircraft bombed the fortress during the fighting. Witnesses said the bombs hit an area of the compound where the Taliban fighters were.

The US special forces troops in Afghanistan work with anti-Taliban military commanders, including Rashid Dostum, whose forces held the prisoners.

The US troops also carry radios and other equipment to call for and guide US air strikes against Taliban forces.

The Taliban soldiers appeared to have planned the battle, ‘‘which appears to be a suicide mission on their part’’, Culler said. Most of the Taliban fighters were not Afghans and were from Pakistan and Chechnya, Stoneking said.

Dostum brought in about 500 of his fighters to quell the uprising, Stoneking said.

Foreign fighters in Kunduz had insisted on security guarantees following reports of summary executions by the Northern Alliance in Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, the Afghan capital.