Friday, April 1, 2005
Coalition forces arrest three Taliban commanders
Associated Press
Kabul, April 1
US-led and Afghan forces have seized three mid-level Taliban commanders in a central region of the war-scarred country, officials said on Friday.
The men were arrested in an operation Thursday in the Charchino district of of Uruzgan province, Lieutenant General Muslim Ahmed, a commander of the Afghan National Army (ANA) in Kandahar told AFP.
"They were hiding in a house. We had intelligence about their presence. The raid was conducted jointly by US forces and ANA," he said. "The house was surrounded, and there was no exchange of fire during the operation."
The detainees were handed over to coalition forces, he added. The US-led military coalition has around 18,000 troops in Afghanistan who have been hunting down militants from the ultra-Islamic Taliban regime since it was toppled in late 2001.
Taliban attacks have surged with the advent of spring, with a series of bomb blasts and ambushes leaving a number of Afghan policemen and militants dead.
Officials said Friday that a former Taliban commander had surrendered to the Afghan government, one of most high-profile figures to do so.
Commander Abdul Waheed handed himself over to the authorities in southeastern Helmand province to take advantage of a planned amnesty announced by Kabul early this year.
US-backed President Hamid Karzai's administration has been in talks with a number of former Taliban leaders in recent months but has not announced the final details of the amnesty scheme.
The top US commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General David Barno, said this week that the Al-Qaeda terror network was trying to mastermind a comeback by the Taliban.
The militia supported Osama bin Laden both before and after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
© HT Media Ltd. 2004.