Top Bin Laden Aide Believed Dead; Troops Battling Taliban

A top aide and confidant to Osama bin Laden is believed to have been killed in a U.S. air attack this week, said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who also disclosed Friday that American Special Forces troops are now engaged in direct combat on the ground in Afghanistan.

Mohammed Atef, the top military strategist in the Al Qaeda terrorist network, was believed killed when a bomb struck a headquarters building in or near the capital, Kabul, Rumsfeld and other officials said.

They said they lacked confirmation of the intelligence reports, which came from intercepted phone conversations among people connected with the organization. But Rumsfeld said, “The reports I’ve received seem authoritative.”

The death would deal a blow to the group held responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

Rumsfeld disclosed the development en route to Chicago, as he offered accounts of U.S. Special Forces troops on horseback in camouflage garb, making their way across Afghanistan. He even provided a photograph of the riders.

His comments came as the Taliban appeared to be close to ceding power in Kandahar, the city in southern Afghanistan that is the home of its supreme leader and the center of the regime’s power.

The Afghan Islamic Press, which is close to the Taliban, reported late Friday that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar had agreed to leave his headquarters in Kandahar. The Pakistani-based agency said Omar had decided to head for the mountains after discussions with “close friends and army commanders.”

At a Pentagon briefing, Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem said that he didn’t believe the report and that Afghanistan remains a “hostile environment.”

But there was considerable confusion about the exact status of the discussions in the city, with some observers expressing doubt that a hand-over is imminent.

In Quetta, the Pakistani city closest to Kandahar, it appeared clear Friday that intense discussions were underway between the Taliban and Pushtun tribal elders. But there was uncertainty about how easy it would be for the Taliban--which is dominated by ethnic Pushtuns--to hand over power. In its ranks are hundreds of Arab fighters who have nowhere to go if the Taliban gives up Kandahar and who would be clear targets for both the Americans and for anti-Taliban Pushtuns who have long wanted Arab fighters to leave the country.

With the negotiations underway, many Taliban were leaving the city, said Mohammed Yusef Pushtoon, a spokesman for Gul Agha Shirzai, a Pushtun leader with a large number of troops south of Kandahar.

Pushtoon said it appeared that the top Taliban leadership had already left the city with many of the Arab fighters. But some Taliban fought on.

Meanwhile, Pentagon officials said opposition groups continued to make gains around Kabul, the western city of Herat and the northern city of Kunduz. Even so, the situation was in flux near Kunduz, and U.S. officials said control of Jalalabad also was unclear.

Late Friday, the Pentagon disclosed that a U.S. bomb landed near or on a mosque in Khowst, south of Kabul, on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The mosque was damaged, but the extent of the damage or any injuries isn’t known, the Pentagon said.

According to the U.S. Central Command, it was one of three laser-guided 500-pound bombs dropped by two Air Force planes Friday. Two struck a known Al Qaeda facility, but the third bomb “suffered a guidance malfunction,” the Pentagon said.

An earlier airstrike is believed to have killed Atef, an Egyptian also known as Abu Hafs al Masri. Atef was under indictment in connection with the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He has been an aide to Bin Laden for more than 10 years, and a daughter is married to one of Bin Laden’s sons.

He is also a former member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the terrorist group held responsible for assassinating Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 in retribution for his peace deal with the Israelis.

Senior defense officials portrayed the demise of Atef as both a personal loss for Bin Laden and a significant setback for Al Qaeda, which is a loosely knit and relatively small group.

Stufflebeem, a senior Pentagon operations official, said Atef’s death would mean that Bin Laden “no longer has a principal assistant that he has been counting on for developing military or terrorist operations.”

He said that the building where Atef reportedly was struck had been targeted as one of a number of “command and control” structures in the area. This strike was separate from another, on Tuesday, that the Pentagon said killed several officials of the Taliban and perhaps of Al Qaeda.

In discussing the activities of Special Forces troops, Pentagon officials have said little about their movements except for an Oct. 19 raid by U.S. Army Rangers and counter-terrorist commandos on two sites near Kandahar.

But Rumsfeld on Friday offered new insights into the mission of these troops, who in recent days have been increasingly busy trying to help ethnic Pushtun tribes in the south overthrow the Taliban in Kandahar.

“We have a number of teams now--the coalition does--in the south,” Rumsfeld said.

He said the forces now numbered in the hundreds of troops.

Standing in the aisle of his airplane, Rumsfeld said, “You won’t believe this,” then flashed a photograph of Northern Alliance troops and other men on horseback.

Rumsfeld pointed to the men in light camouflage uniforms and identified them as Special Forces troops, adding that the Pentagon had received requisition forms asking for saddles, bridles and horse feed. “This is how they’re moving equipment: It’s a pack animal,” Rumsfeld said.

In addition to being trained in hand-to-hand combat and other specialties such as staging ambushes and sniping, special operations units learn to adapt to jungles, deserts and other climates--and to blend in to the areas where they are sent. If they know they are going to an area where horses are needed to get around, for instance, they may well be trained in horseback riding, a former Army Ranger said.

No U.S. soldiers have been killed in the region, other than the two who died in a helicopter accident in Pakistan, which the Pentagon previously disclosed, Rumsfeld said.

But the U.S. soldiers are “armed and participating,” he said. “Indeed, we’ve had instances where they’ve been overrun.”

He described an instance, disclosed this week by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, in which U.S. forces who were aiding Northern Alliance troops were rescued by U.S. air power after facing an attack north of Kabul.

He said U.S. officials are gaining valuable information from Taliban and Al Qaeda members who have been captured since the opposition offensive began this month.

As the opposition forces move in and the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces move out, “it offers a number of opportunities,” Rumsfeld said, hinting that the prisoners were senior-level Taliban and Al Qaeda members. “We do have some names--they’re not privates.”

Papers left behind by rapidly fleeing Taliban members and interviews with those who have been captured are likely to yield information that will help U.S. authorities locate Bin Laden and his associates here and in other countries, Rumsfeld said.

In Kunduz, where Taliban forces include many foreigners, the fighters have been unable to reach an agreement to surrender because Northern Alliance commanders have said the amnesty they offer local Taliban fighters does not apply to foreigners. The Northern Alliance blames these foreign fighters for the worst excesses of Taliban rule.

Earlier attempts to broker an agreement have failed, Rumsfeld said, leaving a tense situation with no easy solution.

“Were they Afghans, they could melt into the scenery. They could switch sides,” Rumsfeld said.

About 100 British commandos landed Friday at the Bagram air base north of Kabul as an advance team to begin clearing land mines there and making the huge, Soviet-built base safe for emergency relief flights, according to the British government.

Northern Alliance officials said privately that the British troops had landed without seeking permission, raising suspicions among some Afghans that the troops are just the start of a massive international military intervention aimed at preventing the Northern Alliance from holding onto power in Kabul.

The alliance’s public position is that international troops are welcome as long as they don’t take sides in Afghanistan’s many political, religious and ethnic factions.

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Hendren reported from North Chicago and Richter from Washington. Times staff writers Paul Watson in Kabul and Alissa J. Rubin in Quetta contributed to this report.