Hunt for Al Qaeda Intensifies

WASHINGTON — Hundreds of U.S. and allied soldiers have begun searching both sides of the Afghan border with Pakistan in an expanding campaign to track down Al Qaeda fighters that has led to the deaths of four suspected holdouts in two clashes Monday and Tuesday, U.S. defense officials said.

About 200 U.S. Army infantrymen and a small number of Australian special operations troops have been scouring suspected Al Qaeda caves and buildings amid intelligence reports that terror mastermind Osama bin Laden is hiding in the lawless Pakistani frontier region of Waziristan, southwest of Peshawar. They join a force of hundreds of British Royal Marines, who number 1,600 throughout Afghanistan.

The firefights highlight both the difficulty of tracking down lingering Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters and the increased danger faced by U.S. and other coalition soldiers who have intensified the border search.

Australian soldiers killed as many as four suspected Al Qaeda fighters in two clashes in Afghanistan within a mile of the Pakistani border, military officials said Tuesday.

Both incidents occurred in the mountains southeast of Kabul, where American warplanes and coalition foot soldiers attacked pro-Taliban holdouts in March during Operation Anaconda, the biggest ground battle of the war. Defense officials have said they do not expect the border campaign to be an operation of that size, in part because the number of suspected Al Qaeda in the region remains small--”not thousands,” said Army Maj. Gen. Frank L. Hagenbeck, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

The clashes began early Monday when four suspected Al Qaeda fighters fired mortar rounds and rocket-propelled grenades at Australian soldiers who were scouting suspected terrorist havens, defense officials said.

The Australians returned the fire and killed two, U.S. and Australian officials said.

No Australians were injured. The two slain gunmen were dragged away by fellow fighters, Hagenbeck told reporters Tuesday at Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

Before dawn Tuesday, two more suspected Al Qaeda fighters were killed in a second firefight involving Australian forces, said defense officials, who offered few details.

Figuring that the enemy would regroup overnight, “we were ready for that, and we killed two,” Hagenbeck told Associated Press.

A subsequent sweep of caves and buildings in the area by U.S. infantrymen from the 101st Airborne Division and the Australians revealed caches of mortar shells, grenades, machine gun ammunition and food, Australian Brig. Gen. Mike Hannan told reporters in Canberra, the Australian capital.

U.S. and Australian officials identified the gunmen as Al Qaeda, which usually refers to non-Afghan Arabs, rather than Taliban. But they offered little detail.

“I can confirm that it was the Al Qaeda that fired on our troops,” Hannan said.

The incidents shed light on a heightened search on the Afghan side of the porous mountain border, but defense officials have said little about an ongoing search by U.S. soldiers in the tribal regions on the Pakistani side.

The Al Qaeda fighters appear to treat the area as if it had no border, spiriting in and out of Afghanistan in a region with few governmental controls, said U.S. Special Forces soldiers who have searched the cave-ridden mountains near the Tora Bora area of eastern Afghanistan.

The “middle-level” Al Qaeda holdouts in eastern Afghanistan appear to be reporting to commanders who have managed to maintain communications with an intransigent and organized fighting force, Hagenbeck said.

“I think that they still do have a command-and-control structure in place,” he said.