Marines’ Mission Winding Down

The Marine Corps is preparing a facility in Kandahar to house several hundred prisoners from the battle at Tora Bora and has stopped seeking Al Qaeda leaders, a Marine officer said Saturday.

After weeks of helping Afghan opposition forces topple the Taliban regime--culminating with the Marines reopening the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and taking control of the Kandahar airport--their role in the conflict is winding down.

“The Marines are ending their mission here within weeks,” said the officer, who asked to remain anonymous.

Marines are leaving the task of finding fleeing Al Qaeda leaders to forces of Prime Minister-designate Hamid Karzai and other Afghan civilian leaders. They have withdrawn the Humvee-driving “hunter-killer” teams that had been scouring the countryside looking for suspected terrorist leaders.

“We have not come here to get into the policing business,” the officer said.

The timing of the Marine Corps’ withdrawal has not been set. Another U.S. military service is expected to assume the role of holding and questioning the expected 100 to 300 prisoners from the battle in the mountains of Tora Bora, to the northeast, where Al Qaeda fighters are making a last stand.

Regardless of which service assumes the task, security will be tight. The prisoners are likely to be “hard-core,” the officer said.

“If they see a chance to overcome and kill a guard, they are willing to do that,” he said, “even if it means their own death. That’s what we’re preparing for.”

The Marines are shifting troops and equipment from their desert outpost, dubbed Camp Rhino, to the airport in Kandahar, which they seized Thursday.

About 2,000 Marines from the Camp Lejeune, N.C.-based 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit and the Camp Pendleton-based 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit have been part of the campaign in Afghanistan.

Marine Corps troops helped box in Al Qaeda and Taliban forces so they could be engaged and overcome by Afghan opposition forces.

Navy and Marine Corps fighter jets from carriers in the northern Arabian Sea and Air Force bombers from land bases were also key.

Navy Seabees are working to patch the runway at the Kandahar airport to make it usable by civilian planes performing humanitarian missions and by military aircraft. The site of one of the war’s fiercest battles, the airport is littered with craters, and nearly all the windows are broken.

Marines are collecting piles of weapons found at the site. Burned-out Russian helicopters lie beside the runway.

Helicopter flights from Camp Rhino to the airport were halted for several hours Friday night after an active surface-to-air missile installation was discovered in the hills near the facility. It was several hours before it could be determined that the installation was in friendly hands and the flights bringing in infantry troops could resume, Marine officials said.

The troops will provide security while the airport is being repaired.

Marines are also defusing land mines that ring the airport. U.S. personnel are searching for possible caches of chemical weapons.

One particularly thorny problem has been offloaded by the Marines. John Walker Lindh, 20, the American who fought with the Taliban, was taken from Camp Rhino on Friday night to the amphibious assault ship Peleliu in the Arabian Sea. While at Camp Rhino, Lindh was tended by nurses for his wounds and dehydration.

A Marine who saw Lindh said he was subdued, slept a good deal and gave mostly one-word answers to questions about his physical condition. “His world has turned upside down,” the Marine said.