US forces unearth 200-tonne explosives haul in Afghanistan

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan (AFP) Apr 28, 2003
US Special Forces have discovered a massive haul of more than 200 tonnes of explosives in a cave complex in northwest Afghanistan, a military spokesman said Monday.

Acting on a tipoff from Afghans, Special Forces last week discovered 204 tonnes (450,000 pounds) of explosives in 17 caves near Maimana, capital of Faryab province, Colonel Roger King told reporters at Bagram Air Base 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Kabul.

The haul included 80 tonnes (175,000 pounds) of high explosive and the rest was from small arms ammunition, he said.

Earlier this month, Romanian soldiers discovered thousands of rockets and more than a million rounds of ammunition in what the US military then described as the largest weapons cache ever discovered by US-led forces in Afghanistan.

The find near Qalat, capital of southern Zabul province, included 3,000 107mm rockets, 250,000 rounds of 12.7mm machinegun ammunition, about one million rounds of small arms ammunition and other ammunition and mines.

Afghan forces earlier this month also discovered about 18 caves full of ammunition and weapons near Maimana. Each cave was 15 metres by five metres by four metres (50 feet by 17 feet by 13 feet) high, Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali said when he announced the find.

Those weapons appeared to have been stockpiled during Afghanistan's 1992-1996 civil war, however, not a Taliban or al-Qaeda arsenal.

Special Forces also uncovered six smaller caches of weapons including 400 107mm rockets and machineguns in the Madr valley northeast of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan.

Following trouble with militias in that area over the past couple of months, the Afghan national army had "relieved some of the people up there of extra arms and ammunitions and things settled down a lot," said King.

Disarming around 100,000 local militiamen and reintegrating them into the nascent national army or retraining them is a priority for President Hamid Karzai as he attempts to extend the authority of his government to the provinces and improve the security situation in the country after more than two decades of war.

Nearly 18 months after the fall of the Taliban, coalition bases and pro-government forces regularly come under attack from remnants of the militia and their al-Qaeda allies in the south and east of Afghanistan, where a US-led coalition of more than 10,000 troops is hunting them down.

SPACE.WIRE