Pentagon: We don’t know who is escaping, who is not

While American forces hunt for senior Taliban and al-Qaida leaders, the Pentagon fears that some on its most-wanted list may already have slipped away.

“We do not know who is escaping and who is not,” Gen. Peter Pace said Wednesday.

The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was answering a question about al-Qaida fighters in the Tora Bora cave complex, which the Pentagon has said may be al-Qaida’s last stronghold in the country.

Osma Bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, are believed to still be hiding somewhere in Afghanistan. But Pace said he didn’t know whether senior leaders were among the holdouts at the mountain battleground in the east of the country.

“It’d be nice if there were leaders there and it’d be great if we were able to kill or capture them,” Pace told a Pentagon press conference. But exactly who is there won’t be known until forces on the ground fight their way through the area.

Afghan rebels fighting al-Qaida forces have been trying to negotiate a surrender there, something that hasn’t always spelled success in other parts of the country.

So far, the only captured fighter U.S. forces are holding is American John Walker, a Californian found among Taliban fighters.

Following surrender talks in the last major Taliban stronghold of Kandahar last week, the entire Taliban senior leadership -- wanted for harboring the terrorists in Afghanistan -- escaped instead, a defense official said on condition of anonymity.

Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and some two dozen other former ruling figures were believed to be in the city during the negotiations, then scattered to somewhere in southern Afghanistan, evading U.S. capture, the official said.

Other reports say some of them have crossed into neighboring Pakistan.

It’s also unclear what has happened to any leaders that might have been among the 5,000 to 6,000 prisoners held by Afghan opposition forces around the country.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has said that it would take time to interrogate the prisoners and sort through them to know who they were and whether they were of value for intelligence or for prosecution.

But so far, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said, the only person known to have been handed over to U.S. forces for detention is Walker, who was found among prisoners during an uprising near the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif last month.

One reason no big fish have been captured, the Pentagon says, is that they may be dead. U.S. warplanes have been hammering Taliban forces and al-Qaida hiding places and training centers since air strikes began Oct. 7.

So far only seven deaths have been reported among the more than two dozen al-Qaida the Americans are looking for.

There were unconfirmed reports that Taliban and al-Qaida figures taken prisoner in the fall of Taliban-controlled Mazar-e-Sharif and other northern cities have since bribed their way out of detention and escaped to Iran.

Asked about reports that such fighters have escaped, Pace noted that anti-Taliban forces have been successful in taking over much of the country in recent weeks, but that they could only do so much.

“They may very well not be able to stop all the movements of all the enemy forces,” he said. “We just don’t know.”

Rumsfeld and others have said repeatedly that the task of hunting down the terrorists and their protectors in the Afghan government would be extremely hard.

Marines are blocking roads leading away from Kandahar. They have killed some fleeing fighters, but captured none, the Pentagon said.

With just around 2,000 Americans on the ground in a country the size of Texas, officials say it is impossible for them to monitor the many roads, paths and other possible escape routes.

The Navy is interdicting ships in case of attempts to escape by sea. They have stopped and searched several but found nothing. They have queried hundreds -- meaning radioed or otherwise signaled them to identify themselves, their destination and their cargo.

Officials also are watching other modes of transportation, such as known drug smugglers and others who may agree to fly al-Qaida members away for a price, one official said.

Though Pakistan is thought to be the most likely place for them to run to in the short term, both the Taliban and al-Qaida have sympathizers and allies in other places in the region.

Officials note bin Laden has connections in Somalia, Chechnya, Sudan, Indonesia and elsewhere.

As for low-level Afghan Taliban fighters, many are expected to blend back into Afghan society. Rumsfeld has indicated the United States isn’t bothering to try to catch them, but rather leave them for fellow Afghans to deal with.

Haron Amin, envoy for the northern alliance opposition in Washington said Afghanistan is rife with rumors about who is escaping and who has been killed.

“I think it’s impossible to know right now what is really going on and what is just rumor,” he said.