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CNN Live At Daybreak

Eastern Alliance in Close Quarters Battle With Al Qaeda

Aired December 06, 2001 - 06:02   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.
CATHERINE CALLAWAY, CNN ANCHOR: Well some of the battles in the offensive in eastern Afghanistan are being called a close quarters fight, and anti-Taliban forces are engaging al Qaeda fighters near their Tora Bora mountain stronghold with artillery fire and even gun battles in caves and woodlands and CNN's Tim Lister is joining us now live by videophone from near the Tora Bora fighting to give us the very latest. Tim, what can you tell us?

TIM LISTER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Catherine within the last an half an hour, an F-16 has flown over this area and dropped two bombs on a ridge that's being defended by the al Qaeda group that's up there. We're not sure whether it's a couple of hundred, maybe as many as 1,000 al Qaeda fighters in a -- in a hill ridge that stretches about 10 miles, which is some eight miles from here.

And right now as I speak, there's an EC-3 surveillance plane overhead, which suggests there's more attacks to come. This happens as the anti-Taliban forces -- the Eastern Alliance as they're known here, are having a pretty tough time making any headway against those al Qaeda fighters. We have a report from further up the front line that three of their fighters have been killed. Their bodies have been left for collection tomorrow and that they're falling back some way. So the al Qaeda fighters putting up very stiff resistance in the hills of the White Mountains immediately behind.

CALLAWAY: Tim, can you tell us -- we understand that even those they're meeting great resistance, the Northern Alliance has been able to take some of the caves in that area. Can you tell me what they found in those caves?

LISTER: They do -- they have been able to take one or two caves here in the -- in the lower foothills and they've found them well prepared, well fortified, some of them well provisioned. It seems that the al Qaeda fighters who came up here from Jalalabad, which is only a two-hour drive down some very rocky tracks, were ready to make quite a last stand here, and they were preparing these caves -- fortifying these caves. They're going to very hard to dislodge them from their position.

CALLAWAY: All right, CNN's Tim Lister joining us from just near the Tora Bora region. Intense fighting going on there in Afghanistan -- the Tora Bora area.

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