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U.S. Bombs Suspected Taliban Compound | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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KABUL, Afghanistan, AP- 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.

&#34We conducted an airstrike on a target we deemed we had to hit immediately. The target was an enemy compound in Kunar province,&#34 U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Jerry O”Hara said. &#34The bombing was done using precision guided munitions. The target objective was intelligence driven.&#34

He said a &#34battle damage assessment is ongoing&#34 and declined to speculate on casualties from the attack, which happened at dusk on Friday. O”Hara also declined to say if the airstrike was directly related to the missing military team.

He said earlier Saturday that there had been no sign of the team by rescuers who are desperately scouring the mountains near Asadabad town, Kunar province, close to the Pakistani border.

A purported Taliban spokesman claimed Friday that militants had captured one of the men.

Meanwhile in central Afghanistan, 18 rebels and two Afghan soldiers were killed in an assault on a Taliban hide-out in mountains where about 100 insurgents were thought to be camped, Uruzgan provincial Gov. Jan Mohammed Khan said.

The operation comes after fighting in the region left 25 people dead, including nine tribal elders who Taliban rebels kidnapped and then killed, apparently in retaliation for the deaths of their own.

The loss of the American military team in remote eastern mountains worsened the already stinging blow suffered by the U.S. military after 16 troops were killed Tuesday aboard the MH-47 Chinook chopper.

It comes as the United States is scrambling to deal with an insurgency that threatens three years of progress toward peace.

U.S. forces were using &#34every available asset&#34 to search for the missing men, O”Hara said. The troops are a small team from the special operations forces.

The downed helicopter had been trying to &#34extract the soldiers&#34 Tuesday when it went into the mountains.

&#34All our hopes are that we find our missing servicemembers. On top of those hopes are actions on the ground looking for them,&#34 O”Hara said. &#34It”s a very demanding area: Very mountainous, very wooded and the likelihood of enemy contact is probable.&#34

The Taliban claim to have captured one of the men came from purported spokesman Mullah Latif Hakimi. He said a &#34high-ranking American&#34 was caught in the same area as where the helicopter went down.

O”Hara said there was &#34no proof or evidence indicating anything other than the soldiers are missing.&#34

Hakimi, who also claimed insurgents shot down the helicopter, often calls news organizations to take responsibility for attacks, and the information frequently proves exaggerated or untrue. His exact tie to the Taliban leadership is unclear.

The loss of the helicopter, the missing men and the fierce clashes in central Afghanistan follow three months of unprecedented fighting that has killed about 495 suspected insurgents, 49 Afghan police and soldiers, 134 civilians, and 45 U.S. troops.