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American Morning

Joint U.S. and Afghan Operation to Capture Pocket of Al Qaeda Terrorists Ends

Aired January 28, 2002 - 07:33   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Turning now back to Afghanistan. A joint U.S. and Afghan operation this morning to capture a pocket of al Qaeda terrorists holed up inside a wing of a hospital in Kandahar, which has just ended. CNN cameras captured this exclusive footage of the operation. All six of the terrorists were killed. Five Afghan soldiers were wounded, but there are no reports of U.S. casualties.

Outside of Kandahar, CNN's Martin Savidge has been with U.S. Special Forces working to secure the perimeter of the city, moving from foxhole to foxhole. He joins us now with this update -- good morning, Martin.

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning to you, Paula. Welcome to the Mushroom. As you know, the members of the 101st Airborne now in charge of the Kandahar Airport. Just a demolition of some unexploded ordnance, if you heard the boom in the background, nothing to be concerned.

Anyway, the 101st is moving out, trying to push the perimeter. We have joined them here. This is about as far out as you could possibly be. The other time we talked to you live, we were on the opposite side of the runway. Now, we are well deep into what they would call unfriendly territory.

Watch your step as you walk here, the ground very uneven. It has been flailed. Flailing is something that the Norwegian units do out here. We like the flailers. The reason why, this all used to be a mine field. The flailer is a big machine that comes out here and just beats the living daylights out of the ground, and that basically sets off the land mines. They think they have them all. We better keep our cables in order.

Say hello to Kelly Moore (ph). He is up on top of the Humvie here. He is in charge of basically the 50-caliber machine gun, one of the defensive positions that they have out here in the Mushroom. And we can move along and show you a little bit more, try to get some of the faces for the people back home. You can take a look at the equipment that's stacked along here. A lot of it is our equipment. Some of it is military equipment. In a lot of ways, when we're on the move, we look just like the military. Of course, we don't carry any weapons.

Here we have another Humvie that's set up. It's got a Mark 19 automatic grenade launched on top. Fabian Gonzalez (ph) is the gunner on that particular weapon, keeping an eye out on the unfriendly territory. And then right now, we are joined by Lieutenant Dave Staffel. He's the man in charge of the Mushroom out here. Tell us a little bit about what is a Mushroom.

LT. DAVE STAFFEL, PLATOON LEADER, 101ST AIRBORNE: Actually we have a defensive perimeter, and in order not to have your defense so linear, you want to have positions out away from the line. And that's what we are. There are two positions just like this. This is the one on the -- actually the east end of the air field.

SAVIDGE: It's a heavily fortified position. You've got a clear line of fire, right?

STAFFEL: Yes. Basically we can cover a lot of fields of fire that the guys on the line can't. We cover some of the dead space that they can't see and put fires on there.

SAVIDGE: All right. So, Paula, there you have it. We're going to be staying in the Mushroom, not only the remainder of the day, not much left, but all of tonight. There has been a lot of activity out here over the past few nights. We'll see if there is any more -- Paula.

ZAHN: Well, it was interesting. We have never been inside that Mushroom area before. Martin Savidge, thanks so much for taking us there.

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