FROM DEBKA INTELLIGENCE FILES
[b]Afghan ground offensive set[/b]
Turkish special forces mission to occupy Kabul
[url]http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=24991[/url]

Unless President Bush has changed his mind at the last minute, U.S. troops are being deployed for the ground offensive in Afghanistan, according to the intelligence sources of DEBKA-Net-Weekly.

Helicopters taking off from the decks of the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk in the northern Arabian Sea near Pakistan will ferry most of the soldiers to their targets.

The mission, according to DEBKA, is to capture the Afghan capital Kabul. They will be joined by additional U.S. forces, flown in to Kabul by helicopter from staging-bases in Pakistan, together with imported Turkish special forces units. Those Turkish troops are intended to stay on in Kabul as an occupation force.

The other mission is to seize the Taliban army lines blocking the advance of opposition Northern Alliance troops towards the capital.

U.S. strategy assigns high importance to keeping the opposition force – and especially its tanks – from entering the Afghan capital. [b]The reason is simple: The tanks are Russian and manned by Russian crews[/b]. The strategic pact Bush forged with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a telephone conversation Sept. 23 admits Moscow to a position of influence in Afghanistan's post-war government. But it also specified that no Russian military forces were to set foot in Kabul.

Other U.S. troop units will fly into Afghanistan from Tadjikistan to land simultaneously at the gates of Kandahar and Jalalabad. They should find some friendly faces on the ground. [b]The sites where they touch down have been under the control of U.S. Special Forces for more than two weeks[/b]. In that time, the ground units have accumulated intelligence, marked out targets for U.S. bombers and missiles and ambushed forward command units of the Afghan Arab army, a force under Osama bin Laden's direct command.

The damage wrought by the U.S. Special Forces units was palpable in the Middle East this week. Families in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Lebanon were informed that loved ones had been killed in Afghanistan. The news and rumors spreading like wildfire round the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula gravely embarrassed the affected regimes.

An Egyptian national, Abu Basir al-Masri, was among the most prominent casualties. Al-Masri commanded the Arab Afghan legion in Jalalabad. He was also senior operations officer under bin Laden and Iman al-Zuhari, head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, his very name a testament to his high rank – Basir is Arabic for "he who sees or leads the way."

Basir was equal in rank to Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric imprisoned in the United States for his role in the explosion in the World Trade Center in 1993.

U.S. troops will find comrades in arms not only in Jalalabad and Kandahar but also in Kabul. [b]Sources report that combined units of U.S., British and German special forces, as well as special Pakistani military intelligence groups, already control large sections of the capital.[/b]

Eric The(So?IsItOn?OrHasItBeenOnAllThisTime?)Hun[>]:)]

I find this report a little hard to believe.  Capturing cities is not a SpecOps mission.

'Control' might mean something a little different than 'capturing' a city. I would think that a few units of Special Forces could 'control' most cities in the World!

Eric The(Course,WhatDoIKnow!)Hun[>]:)]

Last Wednesday, I posted an article from the Times of India reporting on an Iranian radio broadcast story of a firefight between US Special Forces and Taliban near Kandahar!

Sometimes, you just gotta go with stories that come from sources you would not otherwise view as reliable. Iran is seeking at the present time to appear 'reasonable' to the rest of the world, especially the Western world!

Eric The(UntilYouDiscoverOtherwise)Hun[>]:)]