Marines to join the hunt

Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2001 | 11:02 a.m.

SUN WIRE REPORTS

WASHINGTON -- In what would be the largest buildup of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, up to 1,600 Marines are preparing to join hundreds of U.S. commandos as early as this week for a final drive to hunt down Osama bin Laden, military officials said.

Meanwhile the U.S. military hopes that Afghans seeking a $25 million reward, not American soldiers, will creep through caves hunting for top al-Qaida terrorist leaders.

The bounty offered for Osama bin Laden and his top aides, plus additional reward money from the CIA, should encourage "a large number of people to begin crawling through those tunnels and caves, looking for the bad folks," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday.

Already Afghan tribal chiefs have begun cave-by-cave searches in three slivers of Afghanistan, senior U.S. officials said. U.S. special operations forces are supporting the searches by providing new intelligence of bin Laden's suspected whereabouts, sealing off escape routes, and calling in airstrikes to destroy underground hideouts.

"We're hunting him down," President Bush said Monday. "The net is getting tighter."

About 300 to 500 U.S. special operations forces have begun blowing up bridges, setting roadblocks and watching Afghan borders to prevent bin Laden and his al-Qaida forces from fleeing the country.

The Marines could take the pursuit to a new level, said Michael Vickers, a former special operations officer. The USS Bataan, a Marine amphibious assault ship, joined a similar ship, the USS Peleliu, this weekend in the Arabian Sea, a defense official said. Each ship has 600 to 800 Marine infantry troops trained for commando operations and ready to join the fight in Afghanistan.

The Marines could form large assault teams to back up commandos now on the hunt, Vickers said. An unknown number of CIA paramilitary units also have joined the search.

Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke would not discuss the movement of Marine troops. "We do not comment on operational details," she said.

But defense officials disclosed Monday that the Marines sent vertical-take-off Harrier jets into combat Sunday from the Peleliu.

Bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, is believed to be hiding either in the mountainous central Afghan province of Oruzgan, in a cave-riddled region east of Kandahar near Pakistan, or in caves in the Tora Bora region near the eastern city of Jalalabad, U.S. officials said.

Pentagon officials said they don't plan to let commandos join a cave-by-cave search because the caves are strewn with mines and booby-trapped with grenades.

U.S. special forces and CIA operatives for some time have been spreading the word on the ground that money would be given to Afghans who cooperate with the campaign to get bin Laden and Taliban leaders. Starting Sunday, the rewards also were publicized on Air Force radio broadcasts and in leaflets dropped over Afghanistan, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said Tuesday.

The U.S. hunt for terrorist leaders has already met with some success. The Nov. 14 airstrike on a building south of Kabul that killed al-Qaida's military chief, Mohammed Atef, also killed another 50 al-Qaida members, several senior Taliban officials, and an undisclosed number of Taliban fighters, said a U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

At a Monday new conference, Rumsfeld also said the United States would not allow Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to leave his hometown of Kandahar, even if the anti-Taliban forces surrounding the city offer him safe passage. Rumsfeld added that he hopes Taliban and al-Qaida fighters holding the northern Afghan town of Kunduz are killed or captured, not released.

"The idea of their getting out of the country and going off to make their mischief somewhere else is not a happy prospect," he said. "So my hope is that they will either be killed or taken prisoner.

"As enemy leaders become fewer and fewer, that does not necessarily mean that the task will become easier," he said. "People can hide in caves for long periods. This will take time."

He denied reports that U.S. intelligence has defined a narrow search area for bin Laden and his associates.

"To try and think that we have them contained in some sort of a small area I think would be a misunderstanding of the difficulty of the task," he said.

Rumsfeld said the special forces in Afghanistan had not yet pursued any Taliban or al-Qaida leaders into neighboring Pakistan. "If one of those folk that we particularly wanted was known" to be crossing a border, "we might have an early intensive consultation with the neighbors," he added.

To spread word of the $25 million reward for getting bin Laden and a "select few" of his lieutenants, the U.S. military is dropping local-language leaflets over Afghanistan "like snowflakes in December in Chicago," Rumsfeld said.

Intelligence officials believe bin Laden is in a rural area of the country, not under Northern Alliance control -- meaning either southeast of Kandahar or around cities like Jalalabad.