US troops hauled bags of documents from abandoned al-Qaida and Taliban caves to Bagram air base last night after days of searching through mountains, turning up secret jail cells and dossiers with photographs and fingerprint samples.
Around 500 US troops spent the past five days going inch by inch through the caves in the Zhawar Mountains of Paktia province near the Pakistani border, then blowing up the caverns after stripping them down in a mission dubbed Operation Mountain Lion.
"The locals were saying these were the caves where Osama bin Laden was" sometime in the past, said Capt. Lou Bauer, 29, of Windsor, NY, who was among a group of soldiers who returned to Bagram airbase yesterday in Chinook helicopters. "We were destroying munitions and felt like we were doing something important."
US and other allied special forces units have been in the Paktia province area occasionally in recent months, identifying cave hide-outs and looking for intelligence to use in the hunt for al-Qaida and Taliban forces.
Intelligence gathered there and during Operation Anaconda, a large assault last month on al-Qaida caves nearby led planners to decide to send a larger force for a thorough search.
"A battalion of 500 searching is different from a few people, so we thought from the intelligence and evidence we saw it was worthwhile for us to go back again," Maj. Bryan Hilferty, a US military spokesman at Bagram, said.
AP