By Carlotta Gall
New York Times
31 March 2003
KABUL, Afghanistan, March 30 — A rocket slammed into the headquarters of the international peacekeeping force in central Kabul today, just hours after American military officials announced that they would expand operations in response to a sharp increase in Taliban activity in southern Afghanistan.
The rocket damaged a building but apparently injured no one, according to a spokesman. The compound is just across the road from the heavily guarded American Embassy here.
A second rocket landed on the eastern outskirts of the city, said an Afghan police official, Gen. Haroon Asif.
Rockets have sporadically been fired into Kabul over the last year, rarely hitting any target or doing serious damage, but they show that opponents to the international military presence are still active.
American officials said one goal of their expanded operations was to find those responsible for the ambush on a Special Forces team on Saturday afternoon that left two men dead and one critically wounded.
The ambush came a day after an armed group of Taliban in the same region pulled a foreign Red Cross worker from his car and shot him. The two attacks were signs of an "uptick" in rebel activity since the start of the war in Iraq, said Col. Roger King, a United States military spokesman.
Hundreds of local Afghan police and intelligence agents were deployed across the area of the southern province of Helmand today to search for the men responsible for the ambush on Saturday as coalition planes patrolled overhead.
Fighting continued in the adjoining province of Oruzgan as hundreds more Afghan forces and American Special Operations forces battled a large group of Taliban fighters believed to have been responsible for killing the Red Cross worker. Thirteen Taliban have been captured, including a senior Taliban member, and eight men have been killed, Khalid Pashtun, an aide to the governor of Kandahar, said today.
Hundreds of American and Romanian soldiers have also been scouring a mountain range farther east, near the Pakistani border, searching villages and confiscating weapons in one of the largest operations mounted in months.
Afghan officials said they believed that the men who attacked the Special Forces convoy were local Afghans and Taliban supporters, who they said covered their faces with turbans.
The deputy police chief of Helmand, Haji Muhammad Ayub, attributed the attacks on the Red Cross worker and on the American soldiers to a notoriously brutal Taliban commander, Mullah Dadullah, who boasted about killing Americans in an interview with the Pashto-language radio service of the British Broadcasting Company on Friday.
"Of course it is the people of Dadullah," Mr. Ayub said. "One day he says, `We are going to be active,' and the next day they launch an attack on Americans."
In the interview, Mullah Dadullah announced the start of a jihad, or holy war, against American forces in Afghanistan, and vowed to make the ground burn under their feet.
"The ground became hot for the Russians here, and so maybe the ground will also become hot for the Americans," he said.
"This is a new thing," Mr. Ayub said. "This is because of Iraq. Lots of people are against the war in Iraq, and they are getting training in Pakistan and coming from there to launch attacks. It's serious and dangerous."
The ambush in a remote hamlet called Hyderabad was well planned, he said. "It's just desert, a bore-well and two houses," he said. The attackers waited for the four-vehicle convoy to pass them and then hit the last car, before making their getaway on motorbikes, Mr. Ayub said.
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Citation: Carlotta Gall, "As Rockets Strike, U.S. Hunts for Taliban Tied to Ambush," New York Times, 31 March 2003.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/31/international/worldspecial/31AFGH.html?pagewanted=print&position=top
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