Holed-up al-Qaida attacked

Associated Press

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — U.S. special forces launched an operation at a hospital today where several al-Qaida gunmen have been holed up for nearly two months.

Two loud explosions and gunfire rocked the walled hospital compound. Witnesses saw a U.S. soldier inside the compound with an M-16 assault rifle.

It was not immediately clear whether any of the gunmen were killed. Afghan soldiers outside the compound said that no bodies or prisoners had been brought out.

The al-Qaida members had taken over four or five rooms of the internal medicine ward, and medical staff have expressed fears that they will wreak enormous violence if attempts are made to capture them.

Officials had said they want to take the remaining al-Qaida fighters, whose nationalities are unknown, out of the hospital alive by allowing them to stay inside until food runs out.

On Sunday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ruled out any possibility of granting prisoner of war status to the suspected terrorists held in a makeshift prison on Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

"They are not POWs. They will not be determined to be POWs," Rumsfeld told reporters accompanying him on his first visit to the detention facility, a hot and dusty camp amid scrub brush and rock.

The Bush administration considers the captured fighters to be "unlawful combatants" and "detainees" rather than prisoners of war because they don’t represent a recognized government and their method of terror violates internationally accepted laws of warfare.

The distinction is significant because under the Geneva Conventions, written after World War II, a POW has certain legal rights that would govern the U.S. military’s interrogations of the detainees and would require that they be released when the hostilities in Afghanistan are over.

Also on Sunday, distraught villagers from the remote town of Khas Uruzgan in Afghanistan trekked to Kandahar on Sunday to complain to Afghan authorities that Army Special Forces killed innocent people in a raid last week.

The villagers said they set out on the 100-mile journey just hours after Wednesday night’s attack, in which Pentagon officials said about 15 people were killed, 27 captured and a large number of weapons destroyed during a raid on a Taliban arms depot.

Villagers, however, claimed U.S. forces bombed their town hall and clinic, and killed and arrested men loyal to Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed interim leader, Hamid Karzai.

U.S. Army spokesman Maj. A.C. Roper said Sunday that the villagers’ reports "are not consistent with our intelligence."

"Our soldiers are well trained. They’re judicious and prudent in their use of force," Roper said. "This war is fluid. It’s an ever-changing battlefield."

However, U.S. officials have acknowledged problems in gathering reliable intelligence in a country with a tradition of shifting loyalties.