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Troops Find Arms Caches Near Afghan Battlefield
Tuesday, April 2, 2002
(1:45 AM ET)
By John O'Callaghan
Reuters

Bryan Hilferty said missions by coalition forces were now complicated by a lack of concentrated pockets of rebels, as had been the case before the Operation Anaconda offensive around Shahi Kot. "We have the resources now to do whatever we need to do," he said. "If they get together in large groups, we'll go get them. If they stay in small groups, we have to go find them."

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan -- Reuters
Afghan soldiers working with U.S.-led forces found an al Qaeda weapons cache near the site of the biggest ground battle of the latest Afghan War, a U.S. military spokesman said on Tuesday.

The arms cache was found in the area of the Shahi Kot Valley in the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan, where the U.S. military says hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters were killed last month, the spokesman told reporters.

Another cache was unearthed near a coalition base just outside the southern city of Kandahar, where ousted Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar had his headquarters, U.S. military spokesman Bryan Hilferty said at Bagram Air Base, just north of Kabul.

"In the Shahi Kot Valley area, our Afghan military allies yesterday found another cache of rocket-propelled grenades, other ammunition and weapons," he said.

Near Kandahar, soldiers found "a relatively large cache of weapons that could have been used to attack the base," he said without giving details.

U.S. soldiers are holding scores of suspected Taliban and al Qaeda operatives at the base.
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2002 © Reuters, Ltd.

Dan