US-led forces said on Wednesday they had inflicted a bloody toll on al Qaeda and Taliban fighters as both sides reinforced a bitter battle in the snow-covered mountains of eastern Afghanistan.
In the Afghan capital of Kabul, two German and three Danish peacemakers died in an accident while destroying munitions.
The U.S. military ordered up to 300 extra troops, 17 attack helicopters and several A-10 aircraft with rapid fire cannon and rockets to the battlefield to counter a flow of fresh al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who joined the fight.
In what has developed into the biggest battle of the campaign, the U.S. military said up to 500 of about 1,000 rebels, including some high ranking leaders, were killed in five days of fighting and at least eight Americans and seven Afghan allies had died.
Gen. F.L. Buster Hagenbeck, commander of "Operation Anaconda" which now has nearly 1,200 U.S. troops in the battle alongside 200 commandos from Western nations and more than 800 Afghan allies, said fundamentalist fighters were rushing to join in a holy war against the United States.
"We have intelligence from a variety of sources ... that the local fundamentalists have called a jihad (holy war) against the Americans and their coalition partners," Hagenbeck said of the biggest land engagement of the Afghan campaign.
President Bush, who in October launched the campaign that toppled the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda -- blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States -- expressed confidence in the outcome of the Gardez battle.
"There's a fierce battle waging, but we're winning that battle," Bush said at the White House, adding some elements were trying to undermine the interim Afghan government to use the Asian nation once more as a base to launch fresh attacks on America.
"I believe that the outcome is reasonably assured -- that people who have been in the battle will either surrender or be killed in the days ahead," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news briefing. "The battle very likely will take some time to play out."
In his first remarks on the latest fighting, interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai said: "We are determined to finish them and send them to hell. It may take one or two days or more but they are finished."
MORE BATTLES AHEAD
Despite battlefield casualties, American commander Hagenbeck said his forces now had the initiative and had suffered no casualties in the last two days.
"In the last 24 hours, we have killed lots, lots of al Qaeda and Taliban ... we've got confirmed kills in the hundreds," he said, adding: "As long as they want to send them here, we'll kill them here. Should they go somewhere else, we'll go with our Afghan allies and coalition forces and kill them wherever they go."
The Gardez fighting was unlikely to be the last battle of the war, given that thousands of Taliban fighters were still at large in Afghanistan, Hagenbeck said.
Only around 150 to 200 enemy fighters had been in the area when the U.S.-led attack began on Saturday east of Gardez, capital of Paktia province, he said, but this number rose rapidly.
Some local Afghan commanders have put the number of regrouped al Qaeda and Taliban fighters as high as 2,300.
There are thousands of caves in the area and bunkers built to fight Soviet forces in the 1980s, the terrain is forbidding and the weather is freezing.
Afghan officials believe neither bin Laden nor Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar are in the battle area.
It quickly became clear to troops on the ground they faced a formidable enemy, including Chechens, Pakistanis and Uzbeks, which was not about to flee or surrender.
"I didn't really expect them to try and duke it out with us," Lt. Col. Ron Corkran, commander of a U.S. infantry battalion, said in a media pool report. "I was just surprised at the intensity of what I saw on the valley floor."
Afghan commanders said the battle was twisting along a front line of bunkers and caves up to the mountain peaks around the village of Shahi Kot. U.S. troops have been fighting sporadic duels with the rebel forces.
Afghan soldiers returning to Gardez from the front line said the rebel fighters were making hit-and-run attacks using tactics honed against the Soviet army.
"They are fighting a guerrilla war," Mohammad Yunis told Reuters. "They have divided into groups of four or five. They jump out of a cave, open fire on us and then dart back into the cave or move to another one. They know the area very well."
The rebels were firing rockets, mortar bombs and heavy machine guns. But the soldiers said the Taliban seemed to be running short of ammunition and coalition forces were nearing their hide-outs.
Afghan commander Abdul Muteen said the enemy was determined to fight to the death. "No one is even thinking of them surrendering. They have already chosen to die for their ideology."
The region's governor warned that it could take weeks before the al Qaeda and Taliban forces were wiped out.
AS FIGHTING RAGES, NEW ARMY EMERGES
As fighting raged close to Gardez, the peacekeepers in Kabul suffered their accident which resulted in five fatalities and three other serious injuries.
The accident's cause was unknown but it came as troops were trying to destroy SA-3 anti-aircraft missiles. "The detonation seems to have gone off early ... even though all procedures had been followed," a military official said.
Also in the capital, warlords from around Afghanistan vowed to cooperate in the creation of a new multiethnic national army at a landmark meeting on Wednesday.
Creating a national army has been a key objective of Karzai's interim government since it took office in December.
There had been resistance to the central government from some warlords and militias in recent weeks, with some refusing to disarm and others still fighting among themselves.
In other signs of fresh al Qaeda activity, newly detected Internet traffic among al Qaeda followers, including intercepted e-mail messages, indicated elements of the group may be trying to regroup in remote parts of Pakistan near the Afghan border.
U.S. officials said the new communications traffic was a serious concern because they feared al Qaeda could use the Internet to launch new attacks against the United States, but the content of the intercepted cyber traffic has not indicated specific threats, The New York Times reported.
Al Qaeda operatives often check messages in public places around the world, making them hard to track, the paper said.
(China Daily March 7, 2002)
