U.S. Continutes Search for Troops In NE Afghan Mountains

KABUL, Afghanistan, July 2 -- U.S. aircraft bombarded a suspected insurgent compound Friday in the same mountainous area of northeastern Afghanistan where a military team has been missing since a skirmish with insurgents Tuesday and where a special operations helicopter carrying troops to rescue the men crashed amid enemy fire, killing all 16 service members aboard, military officials said Saturday.

A man claiming to speak for the Taliban militia, Abdul Latif Hakimi, called news organizations Saturday to claim that 25 civilians died in the U.S. air strike on the compound in Konar province near the Pakistani border.

Lt. Col. Jerry O'Hara, a U.S. military spokesman here, said U.S. troops were still assessing the impact of the bombing. However he said that precision weapons had been used and implied that it was unlikely that civilians were killed.

"We don't target civilians," he said. "We put a lot of effort into ensuring we minimize any type of collateral damage when we do our operations. Our operations are intelligence-driven."

Meanwhile, the military's massive five-day hunt for the missing U.S. team continued without success Saturday, O'Hara said.

On Friday, Abdul Latif Hakimi, whose claims have often proved unreliable, said that Taliban militants had captured one of the missing men and killed seven of them. But U.S. military officials said there was no evidence to support the claim. The missing team was made up of fewer than 10 soldiers, one officer in Washington said.

"They could be hiding under a rock, waiting," the officer said. "There's an ongoing operation searching for them."

O'Hara said "all available assets" were being used to find the men, but that the search had been hampered by the steep, forested terrain and the possibility that "at any turn the search can turn into a fire fight if we encounter enemy forces."

"All we have to date is that our guys are missing," said O'Hara on Friday. "We don't have any positive proof that shows us they were injured, they were captured, or they are just in a hiding spot, waiting for our forces."

The air attack on the compound Friday was part of the larger effort that the missing team was participating in, O'Hara said. "That operation was still ongoing all the while we were conducting search and recovery for our 16 that we lost, and while searching for the missing service members that haven't been accounted for," he said.

The incident in Konar province began Tuesday, when a small team of Special Operations forces were hiking through the region as part of Operation Red Wing, a mission against al Qaeda fighters, according to the military officer in Washington. The officer said none of the team members had been found, nor was it known whether any had been killed or captured.

According to O'Hara, U.S. commanders last heard from the team on Tuesday afternoon after it started taking fire. The downed Chinook helicopter, a Special Operations aircraft, was one of at least two sent to extract the team, O'Hara said.