Taliban Negotiating Release Of One Of Two Missing Naval Personnel After Killing The Other
Jul 25, 2010 12 Comments ›› Pat Dollard
KABUL, Afghanistan — An insurgent faction that claimed to have killed one U.S. serviceman and captured another offered to exchange the slain man’s body for an unspecified number of prisoners, an Afghan official said Sunday.
The two missing Americans, identified by Western officials as U.S. Navy personnel, were last seen Friday in a dangerous part of Logar province, south of the Afghan capital. The NATO force has issued only terse statements regarding their disappearance, and said a massive air and ground search was under way.
Afghan officials in Logar have said the two, who were driving an armored sport-utility vehicle, may have taken a wrong turn and accidentally ended up in a Taliban-held area. NATO has not disclosed why the pair traveled to Logar after leaving their base in Kabul, or said whether the trip was authorized by their superiors.
Illustrating the sometimes splintered nature of the insurgency, there appeared to be confusion within the Taliban about which group had been involved in the confrontation. While the Taliban movement does have an overall command structure, local cells of insurgents _ sometimes intermingled with criminal gangs _ operate semi-autonomously in some parts of the country.
Word of the insurgents’ encounter with the Americans did not come directly from the Taliban’s usual spokesmen, but was relayed by Afghan authorities citing local intermediaries. The two Americans were reported to have disappeared in Charkh district, a hotbed of insurgent activity that is considered dangerous even for Afghan officials, let alone outsiders.
It would be highly unusual for U.S. service members to travel alone and virtually unprotected in the area, and Afghan officials depicted their presence as an apparently unexpected bonanza for the local Taliban.
“They moved toward an insecure area without informing the authorities, and there they encountered the enemy,” said Logar’s police chief, Gen. Mohammad Mustafa Mosseini. He said one of the Americans was killed and one taken alive after insurgents ambushed their vehicle with rocket-propelled grenades.
The insurgents’ demand for an exchange was disclosed by the head of the provincial council in Logar, Abdul Hakim Sulaimankhil. NATO said it has had no contact with the purported captors.
Western military officials on Sunday reported “offensive clearing operations” in Charkh overnight by Afghan and coalition troops that resulted in the capture of two suspected insurgents. The military did not say whether the raid yielded any information about the missing Navy men.
Although Afghanistan is landlocked, U.S. Navy personnel serve a variety of roles in combat here. They include medical corpsmen attached to units from various branches of service, bomb-disposal experts and also elite SEALS who are involved in special operations.
Until now, the Taliban’s only known American military prisoner has been Bowe Bergdahl, an Idaho native who was an Army private at the time of his capture 13 months ago in eastern Afghanistan. Last month he was promoted in absentia to Army specialist.
Bergdahl, whom American officials believe may have been taken across the frontier to Pakistan, has been seen in Taliban-made videos denouncing the Western troop presence.
The circumstances of his capture, too, were murky. In the immediate aftermath of his disappearance, U.S. military officials said he had apparently walked away from his base, but later backtracked on that assertion. In videos, Bergdahl has said he was seized after lagging behind on patrol.
