Kabul, Afghanistan – American warplanes bombed a suspected Taliban compound in an area where an elite U.S. military team has been missing for five days in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, a U.S. military spokesman said Saturday.
It was not clear if there were any casualties from the airstrike, which took place Friday evening. Lt. Col. Jerry O’Hara, spokesman for the U.S. military, declined to say if the strike was directly related to the missing American team.
Meanwhile, a transport plane flew home the bodies of 16 U.S. troops killed when their special-forces helicopter was shot down in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday.
Violence also erupted in other regions – with 38 rebels and Afghan security forces killed as insurgents stepped up their campaign to destabilize the country ahead of crucial elections in September.
O’Hara said Friday’s airstrike hit an enemy compound in Kunar province that “we deemed we had to hit immediately.”
“The bombing was done using precision guided munitions. The target objective was intelligence-driven,” he said.
He said earlier Saturday that rescuers who are scouring the rugged mountains near Asadabad town, Kunar province, near the Pakistani border, had found no sign of the special- forces team.
A Taliban spokesman said Friday that militants had captured one of the men.
The loss of the U.S. military team in the remote eastern mountains worsened the already stinging blow suffered by the U.S. when 16 troops were killed Tuesday aboard the MH-47 Chinook chopper.
It comes as the U.S. is scrambling to deal with an insurgency that threatens three years of progress toward peace.
The downed helicopter had been trying to “extract the soldiers” when it crashed into the mountains, O’Hara said.
In the latest fighting Saturday, 25 rebels and six Afghan soldiers were killed in a raid on a mountainous Taliban hide-out in central Uruzgan province, Gov. Jan Mohammed Khan said.
U.S. and Afghan forces killed three rebels after coming under attack twice near the southern city of Kandahar, the U.S. military reported.
A roadside bomb exploded on the main road in Paktika province as a convoy of 20 vehicles, including cars from the United Nations, drove by, a U.N. spokesman said. Four Afghan policemen were killed.
