Searching For Omar
U.S. troops and their Afghan allies on Wednesday swept through villages and countryside in southeastern Afghanistan in search of heavy weapons.
The joint weapons sweep, which began Monday, focused on an area about 12 miles northwest of the town of Khost, according to local government spokesman Mohammed Gul Gulbaz. Khost is 80 miles southeast of Kabul.
Details have yet to be released, but the raids come against the backdrop of American forces in the Khost area having come under rocket fire at least three times in recent weeks. The individuals responsible for the rocket attacks have not been captured.
Separately, the U.S. military is for the first time revealing the reason why it was in the remote central Afghan village where a wedding party was attacked on July 1, a U.S. military decision the Pentagon has defended but is nonetheless investigating.
U.S. Army spokesman Gary Tallman, at Bagram Air Base, said Tuesday that troops were in Uruzgan province because intelligence from multiple sources suggested that fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was hiding in the region.
U.S. troops have said they believed they were drawing anti-aircraft fire from Uruzgan and responded with AC-130 air strikes which struck civilians celebrating a wedding, killing an estimated 40 Afghans.
Also Tuesday, a Bush administration official commenting on the condition of anonymity said al Qaeda's leaders have all but abandoned their former stronghold of Afghanistan, leaving Omar and his followers on their own in trying to elude the U.S. forces hunting them.
Many of al Qaeda's surviving leaders are believed to have moved to Pakistan, and others have set themselves up elsewhere in the world.
Osama bin Laden himself remains a mystery. The U.S. government does not know whether he is alive or dead and has little evidence suggesting either possibility.
About a dozen of bin Laden's chief lieutenants have been killed or captured, but more than half have escaped. Officials have identified between 15 and 20 more as their "most wanted" members of the group's leadership who are still at large.
Most of the recent captures of al Qaeda figures have been outside of Afghanistan. In recent months, U.S. officials acknowledged the capture of two: operations chief Abu Zubaydah in March in Pakistan, and operational planner Abu Zubair al-Haili in June in Morocco.
A Bush administration official says most of al Qaeda's leadership has been maintaining a low profile to avoid detection.
U.S. counterterrorism officials say chief among their most wanted al Qaeda are top bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, financial chief Shaikh Saiid al-Sharif and operational planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and the April 11 bombing of a Tunisian synagogue.
While most of the Taliban still wanted by the United States are thought to remain in Afghanistan, a few may have gone to Pakistan. They include top Omar aide Tayeb Agha, former Minister of Frontier Affairs Jalaluddin Haqqani and former military commanders Mullah Baradar Akhund, Akhter Mohammed Osmani and Mullah Dadullah.
Though the Pentagon has generally been secretive about identifying which of bin Laden's al Qaeda leaders has been captured, some details have been released: