Kabul: Taliban fighters swarmed over a
mountaintop base abandoned last week by the US military
following some of the toughest fighting of the Afghan war,
according to footage on a major satellite television station.
The video aired yesterday by Al-Jazeera television is
a morale booster for Taliban fighters, though the US insists
the decision to withdraw from the base in the Korengal Valley
was sound and the area has no strategic value.
The footage showed armed men walking through the
former US base, which was strewn with litter and empty
bottles, and sitting atop sandbagged gun positions overlooking
the steep hillsides and craggy landscape. Fighters said they
recovered fuel and ammunition.
But a US spokesman said ammunition had been evacuated
and the fuel handed over to local residents.
"We don't want Americans, we don't want Germans or any
other foreigner. We don't want foreigners, we want peace. We
want Taliban and Islam - we don't want anything else," one
local resident said on the tape.
Another man identified by Al-Jazeera as a local
Taliban commander said the militants intended to use the base
for attacks on US forces.
Maj T G Taylor, a spokesman for US forces in eastern
Afghanistan, said the Americans destroyed major firing
positions and observation posts before they left, and if
militants tried to use the base "we have two companies that
can do an air assault there anytime we want."
The pullout last week of the remaining 120 US soldiers
from the Korengal was part of a strategy announced last year
by the top US and NATO commander, Gen Stanley McChrystal, to
abandon small, difficult-to-defend bases in remote, sparsely
populated areas and concentrate forces around major population
centers.
Many of those outposts were established years ago to
monitor Taliban and al-Qaida infiltration from Pakistan but
proved difficult to resupply and defend.
Last October, about 300 insurgents nearly overran a US
outpost in Kamdesh located north of the Korengal Valley,
killing eight Americans and three Afghan soldiers. It was the
bloodiest battle for US forces since an attack on another
remote outpost in July 2008, when nine Americans died.
PTI
First Published: Tuesday, April 20, 2010, 18:00