A large contingent of US Marines has been deployed in Afghanistan to box in Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network, while Pakistani officials spoke Monday of sealing parts of their frontier to keep out fleeing Taliban troops, despite UN calls for easy entry for a flood of desperate refugees, said reports.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday the Marines had been sent in to ``help pressure the Taliban forces in Afghanistan, to prevent Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists from moving freely about the country,'' reported AP.
At a Pentagon press conference, Rumsfeld said the Marines would number in the ``hundreds, not thousands.,” added the agency, which cited other sources as saying that said about 1,000 Marines would be involved.
Meanwhile, CNN cited the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan as saying Monday that 1,200 US troops had moved into the town of Takhtapul by helicopter, cutting off a main road between the Taliban’s Kandahar stronghold and the Pakistan border.
Marines have flown F/A-18 and EA-6B Harrier attack missions over Afghanistan, and recovered a downed US helicopter in Pakistan, but this is their ground combat debut in Afghanistan, said AP, which reported that an initial group of about 500 Marines had arrived at an airfield near Kandahar, and a like number were to join them.
Marine helicopter gunships attacked an armored column on the ground near Kandahar, Pentagon officials said Monday, according to CNN.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, revealed that five U.S. military members suffered serious injuries Monday when a US attack plane mistakenly dropped a bomb on them near Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, said AP.
Despite a string of military victories, a spokesman for US-led coalition forces said Monday that "we are still far away from the resolution of the situation in Afghanistan. We haven't found bin Laden, Al Qaeda still exists, even in a reduced form, and the Taliban are still hanging on," CNN quoted Kenton Keith, director of the Coalition Information Service, as saying.
PAKISTAN IGNORES UN HUMANITARIAN APPEAL, MOVES TO SEAL BORDER
Despite UN appeals aimed at heading off a humanitarian disaster, Pakistan fortified border security with Afghanistan on Monday, practically sealing main entry points,.
CNN cited Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, official spokesman of Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, as announcing the measures, which are reportedly aimed at blocking efforts by Taliban militiamen and Al Qaeda members to flee the fighting in Afghanistan.
All Afghan men aged between 20 to 40 are being denied entry to Pakistan for fear they are fighters and the ban may be extended in some places even to more vulnerable refugees, said a senior official in the government of Baluchistan province quoted by Reuters.
In some cases, said CNN, pictures of Al Qaeda members and radical Arab fighters had been supplied, apparently by US authorities, in an effort to help border guards spot them and prevent them from entering Pakistan.
However, with 400 to 500 families stranded out in the open on freezing nights, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) said it was trying to convince Pakistan to relax restrictions, according to Reuters.
``We are particularly alarmed since over the past few days more and more malnourished children were spotted among the refugees arriving from Afghanistan, in a clear indication that people arriving now are in an increasingly poor shape,'' the UNHCR said in a statement issued late Monday, cited by the agency – Albawaba.com
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