KABUL, Afghanistan – U.S. aircraft bombarded a suspected insurgent compound in the same mountainous area of northeastern Afghanistan where a military team has been missing since a skirmish with insurgents Tuesday.
It’s the same area where a special operations helicopter carrying troops to rescue the men crashed amid enemy fire, killing all 16 service members aboard, military officials said Saturday.
A man claiming to speak for the Taliban militia, Abdul Latif Hakimi, called news organizations Saturday to say that 25 civilians died in the U.S. airstrike late Friday on the compound in Konar province near the Pakistani border.
Lt. Col. Jerry O’Hara, a U.S. military spokesman in Kabul, said U.S. troops were still assessing the impact of the bombing. However, he said precision weapons had been used and it was unlikely any civilians were killed.
“We don’t target civilians,” he said. “We put a lot of effort into ensuring we minimize any type of collateral damage when we do our operations. Our operations are intelligence-driven.”
Meanwhile, the military’s massive five-day hunt for the missing U.S. team continued without success Saturday, O’Hara said.
On Friday, Hakimi, whose previous claims have often found to be unreliable, said Taliban militants captured one of the missing men and killed seven others. But U.S. military officials said there was no evidence to support the claim. The missing team was made up of fewer than 10 soldiers, one officer in Washington said.
O’Hara said “all available assets” were being used to find the men, but the search had been hampered by the steep, forested terrain and the possibility that “at any turn the search can turn into a firefight if we encounter enemy forces.”
The air attack on the compound was part of the larger effort that the missing team was participating in, O’Hara said. “That operation was still ongoing all the while we were conducting search and recovery for our 16 that we lost, and while searching for the missing service members that haven’t been accounted for,” he said.
According to O’Hara, U.S. commanders last heard from the missing team Tuesday afternoon after it started taking fire. The downed Chinook helicopter, a Special Operations aircraft, was one of at least two sent to extract the team, O’Hara said.
He said the troops on board – eight members of a Navy SEAL team and eight Army airmen – appeared to have died in the crash. On Thursday, U.S. forces were finally able to reach the site and recover the bodies, but the ground team was not found in the area.
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