Edmonton Sun : Air strike targets top Taliban commanders

Air strike targets top Taliban commanders

Southern Afghanistan attack kills dozens

By AP | August 3, 2007

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The U.S.-led coalition said Friday it had launched an air strike on a meeting of top Taliban commanders in a militant stronghold in Afghanistan, and local officials said more than a dozen rebels and civilians had been killed.

The coalition issued a brief statement on the strike Thursday in a remote area of Baghran district in southern Helmand province, saying it targeted two Taliban commanders. It gave few other details and no word of casualties.

Afghan Defence Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi said the strikes killed three senior Taliban, including the commander for Helmand province, Mullah Rahim. About one dozen other militants were killed, he said.

Purported Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi denied Azimi’s claim that Mullah Rahim was killed in the air strike.

An even higher-ranked leader, Dadullah Mansoor, commander of the Taliban for all of southern Afghanistan, was present at the meeting hit by the strike, but his fate was not known, Azimi said.

Azimi said the information about Rahim and other militants deaths was based on their intelligence service reporting. He would not provide further details, and his account could not be independently verified.

“During a sizable meeting of senior Taliban commanders, coalition forces employed precision-guided munitions on their location after ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area,” the coalition statement said.

In apparent reference to the same incident, Mohammad Hussein, the provincial police chief, said that several Taliban and civilians were killed in an airs trike in the Shah Ibrahim area of Baghran district on Thursday.

Taliban militants were hanging two local people accused of spying for the government. Other villagers had come out to watch when the bombs fell, he said.

He said 20 wounded people were brought to the hospital in Helmand’s capital of Lashkar Gah.

Enayatullah Ghafari, the head of the health department for Helmand province, said the youngest victim was an eight-year-old boy and the oldest, a 50-year-old man.

Twelve wounded men were brought to a hospital in the main southern city of Kandahar, said Sharifullah Khan, a doctor there.

Nasibullah, one of the wounded men in Kandahar hospital, said the bombs hit a busy market place. He claimed there were no Taliban in the market at the time of the attack.

Hussein said the area where the attack happened is a known Taliban stronghold.

Dadullah succeeded his brother, Mullah Dadullah, as commander of militant operations in southern Afghanistan when Mullah Dadullah was killed in a U.S.-led operation in May.

Mullah Dadullah had orchestrated Taliban suicide attacks and beheadings in the region, and Dadullah Mansoor told Al Jazeera in June that he had received a personal message of condolence from al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden for the death of his brother.