US warplanes today carried out fresh bombing raids to eliminate the last pockets of al-Qaeda and Taliban resistance in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, an Afghan commander said.
"The fighting is in progress. We continue to finish all of al-Qaeda. The Americans with their airforce, us with our ground forces," said General Attigullah Luddine, who commands hundreds of Afghan troops fighting alongside US forces in the Operation Anaconda offensive, which was launched on March 2th.
"The operation is finished but there are still some very small units of al-Qaeda and Talibans," he told reporters.
"Our forces are still there to clean the area, the high mountains and deep valleys.
"There are still some al-Qaeda and Taliban but their main base is now destroyed," he said at a checkpoint two kilometres (just over a mile) south of Gardez before returning to the Shahi Kot valley, which was the focus of a major coalition offensive earlier in the week.
US military spokesman Major Bryan Hilferty earlier said bombing raids by US aircraft were continuing in the area.
The valley in the Arma mountains, 30 kilometres (19 miles) south of Gardez, capital of Paktia province bordering Pakistan, was the last known stronghold of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.
The commander of US ground forces in Afghanistan, General Paul Mikolashek, described the offensive in the valley and Arma mountains as a "textbook" operation which would make it extremely difficult for the extremists to gather together again in strength.
"They have been hit extremely hard here in this recent fight," the general told reporters at Bagram Airbase, north of Kabul.
"They are on the run. Their infrastructure has been clearly disrupted."
Following the coalition ground offensive on Wednesday to seize control of the valley, the Afghan general said, "we have found between 30 and 35 dead bodies of Arabs, Chechens, Pakistanis and Afghans".
AFP