U.S. special operations forces, including an American gunship, backed Afghan commandos in a predawn raid on a building filled with dozens of Al Qaeda fighters in southern Afghanistan, killing over 20 of the militants, officials said Monday.
A U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship leveled the building in the volatile Helmand Province after a suicide bomber detonated his vest during the joint operation, according to a U.S. official.
Helmand police chief Col. Ehsamudin Helmandi said Afghan special forces killed 22 Taliban militants in addition to the Al Qaeda fighters. At least 14 other militants were wounded and some were taken prisoner as a result of the operations.
Helmandi said six Al Qaeda terrorists were also arrested in the operation, including Pakistani and Bangladeshi citizens.
No U.S. forces were wounded, according to American officials. Some Afghan special forces were wounded in the fight, though exactly how many was not immediately clear.
Dozens of Afghan civilians were also wounded and some killed in the crossfire and by the detonation of the Al Qaeda suicide bomber.
The police chief blamed the Taliban and Al Qaeda for causing the civilian casualties in Musa Qala district because they used the local residents as human shields. The exact number of civilians killed is not immediately clear.
The joint operation destroyed a major Taliban hub in Helmand, which was also a gathering point for Al Qaeda fighters moving through the area. The Al Qaeda fighters were discovered as a result of communication intercepts, U.S. officials said, declining to elaborate because of the sensitivity of the intelligence.
Elsewhere in southern Afghanistan, a coalition service member thwarted a so-called “insider attack” on an armored vehicle carrying U.S. troops in the Kandahar Province.
The fast-acting response from the service member, whose nationality was not immediately clear, saved the lives of all onboard the vehicle, according to a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
No U.S. or allied troops were injured in the attempted attack, which took place off base, an official said. The shooter, a member of the Afghan army, was killed.
Afghan villagers carry a dead body on a stretcher outside a hospital in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, following an airstrike, September 23, 2019. U.S. and Afghan officials were looking into reports that 40 civilians, including children, were killed in an airstrike that hit a wedding celebration in southern Helmand province.
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Kabul, Afghanistan — An Afghan official claimed Monday that dozens of civilians were killed during a raid on Taliban hideouts by U.S. and Afghan special forces in the southern Helmand province. A U.S. military official confirmed to CBS News that American air power was called in to support the forces during the raid targeting senior al Qaeda members. They said the U.S. was "assessing the claims" of civilian casualties.
There were conflicting reports on the numbers of killed and wounded, but it is just the latest instance of purported civilian casualties blamed on U.S. and Afghan forces as the fight against the Taliban and its partners heats up.
U.S. military officials told CBS News that at least a dozen militants were killed in the raid in the Taliban-controlled Musa Qala district of Helmand, including several "senior members of al Qaeda."
Omar Zwak, the provincial governor's spokesman in Helmand, said 14 insurgents including six foreigners were killed, but he confirmed there were also reported civilian casualties that the governor's office was investigating.
Taliban claims deadly attack on hospital
Zwak and a U.S. military official told CBS News that four people were arrested, including Pakistani and Bangladeshi nationals. One of those detained was a woman.
But Abdul Majid Akhundzada, a member of the provincial council in Helmand, said at least 40 civilians, including many women and children, were killed in the operation as a wedding party taking place near the targeted building was caught up in the raid. He said the government had been told in advance that a wedding was taking place, but he did not deny that Taliban militants were known to operate in the area.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's spokesman Sediq Seddiqi said in a statement on Monday that the leader was "saddened and devastated to hear that civilians have lost their lives in an incident in Helmand, despite President Ghani's repeated call for extra cautions in conducting military operations."
"Don't kill us": Civilians "trapped in a war"
A U.S. military official told CBS News that during the operation a suicide bomber came out of the targeted house and blew himself up, killing and wounding "several people" in the house. When other militants opened fire on the Afghan and U.S. special forces, U.S. airstrikes were called in.
Separately a U.S. defense official in Afghanistan told CBS News that there were multiple secondary blasts after the airstrikes, indicating the compound was being used as a weapons cache.
A statement released later Monday by the U.S. military command in Afghanistan confirmed there were "targeted precision strikes," but said, "we assess the majority of those killed in the fighting died from al Qaeda weapons or in the explosion of the terrorists' explosives caches or suicide vests."
One of the U.S. officials who spoke to CBS News earlier said the American military always takes claims of civilian casualties seriously and stressed that these latest reports were being investigated in conjunction with Afghan officials. The official did not dispute the claims that members of a wedding party had been caught up in the violence on Sunday night.
"The locals are trapped in a war between the Taliban and the U.S. and Afghan forces," one local resident told CBS News by phone. "We told the Taliban, 'don't settle foreign militants near our houses,' we told the Afghan government, 'don't target us if militants live in the middle of our houses, that is not our wish or our fault. We can't stop anyone. Don't kill us.'"
The U.S. military often accuses the Taliban of using human shields by operating in areas with a significant civilian presence.
Last week a U.S. drone strike in Nangarhar province, aimed at ISIS militants, purportedly left nine civilians dead. The U.S. military confirmed it was investigating the report of civilian casualties, but noted the U.S. was "fighting in a complex environment against those who intentionally kill and hide behind civilians, as well as use dishonest claims of non-combatant casualties as propaganda weapons."
Nonetheless, with little hope for an imminent peace deal to end the war that began with the post 9/11 U.S. invasion to topple the Taliban in 2001, civilian casualties continue to mount — and continue to be blamed often on the country's own U.S.-backed security forces, or America itself.
Green Beret's death in Afghanistan comes amid increased Taliban violence
As CBS News correspondent Charlie D'Agata reported last week, with President Trump's cancellation of direct peace talks between the U.S. and the Taliban, there is little prospect for any political resolution to the war in Afghanistan at present. While President Trump said recently that the terror groups in the country are being hit "harder than they have ever been hit before," the U.S. death toll continues to rise, and so does the civilian toll.
Also on Monday, the U.S. military confirmed that several service members sustained non-life-threatening injuries when one of its vehicle convoys "was fired on in Kandahar province by a member of the Afghan Civil Order Police." The U.S. mission, called Operation Resolute Support, said the attacker was killed by U.S. troops returning fire. Such "insider attacks" have plagued the U.S. mission in Afghanistan for years.
The Taliban and other militant groups were expected to step up their attacks as Afghanistan prepares to hold national elections this weekend.
CBS News correspondent Charlie D'Agata, and CBS News' Ahmad Mukhtar and Sami Yousafzai contributed to this report.
A British-flagged tanker that Iran seized in July is now free to leave, Tehran said on Monday, more than a month after the British authorities released an Iranian tanker that had been detained off Gibraltar.
The news offered a rare hint of easing tensions for Iran, at a time when the country has been in an escalating cycle of confrontation with its Persian Gulf neighbors and with the United States, including the shooting down of drones, the seizure of tankers and, most recently, an attack on major oil installations in Saudi Arabia.
Officials of the United States and Saudi Arabia, Iran’s chief rival in the region, have blamed Tehran for the Sept. 14 attack on oil facilities in the kingdom, raising the prospect of retaliatory strikes and even war. But so far, the only apparent action they have taken against Tehran is a tightening of economic sanctions.
The legal proceedings against the Stena Impero have concluded, and Iran has decided to waive alleged violations, an Iranian government spokesman, Ali Rabiyee, said at a news conference, according to Iranian and Western news agencies that were present.
The ship had not left Bandar Abbas, a port in southern Iran, as of midday, and it was not clear how quickly it would set sail. Erik Hanell, chief executive of the tanker’s owner, the shipping company Stena Bulk, told SVT, a Swedish television station, that he hoped it would be a matter of hours.
Iran detained the 23-member crew along with the ship. It released seven of them this month, but the others have remained with the vessel.
The decision to release the ship comes a little more than a week after the attack on the Saudi oil installations. Iran has denied any responsibility for the attack, a sophisticated operation involving some two dozen drones and cruise missiles. The aerial strikes damaged infrastructure and temporarily cut Saudi oil production in half, sending tremors through world markets, but they caused no reported casualties.
The Houthi rebel faction in Yemen’s civil war, a group that is known to use weapons supplied by Iran, has said it carried out the attack against Saudi Arabia, which has been bombing in Yemen for more than four years, killing thousands of people.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said early on Monday that there was “a very high degree of probability” that Iran was responsible for the strikes in Saudi Arabia, and he did not rule out British participation in military retaliation.
In May and June, several tankers operating near the Strait of Hormuz were damaged in what the United States said was sabotage by Iranian forces — which Iran also denied. Iran also detained several ships for varying periods of time, notably the Stena Impero.
Analysts have characterized the attacks — whether carried out by Iran or by one of the armed factions it supports in the Middle East — and ship seizures as Tehran’s demonstration that it has the power to cut off a large part of the world’s energy supplies.
Iran wants relief from punishing sanctions imposed by President Trump since he withdrew the United States from a 2015 deal that restricted the Middle Eastern country’s nuclear program. Relations have grown worse since then, as the United States has steadily added more economic penalties, seeking to choke off Iran’s oil sales, the life blood of its economy. In recent months, Iran has taken a series of steps to go beyond the limits imposed by the nuclear accord.
The direct confrontation with Britain began on July 4, when British marines and Gibraltar port officials seized an Iranian tanker, Grace 1, which has since been renamed the Adrian Darya 1. They said the ship was carrying oil to Syria, in violation of a European Union embargo.
Iran denied the allegation and accused the British of concocting the story to act against Tehran at the behest of Washington, though Britain formally opposes the American sanctions.
The government of Gibraltar, a semiautonomous British territory, released the ship six weeks later, and said that it had assurances that the Iranian tanker would not go to Syria. American officials asked that the ship be turned over to them, but the Gibraltar government rejected the request.
Iranian forces commandeered the Stena Impero on accusations that it broke international maritime rules in the region. That came two weeks after Iran threatened to retaliate against the U.K. for impounding an Iranian tanker in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar in early July.
U.K. authorities said the Iranian tanker, now called the Adrian Darya 1, was held for carrying oil to Syria in violation of European Union sanctions. Iran denied that, but indicated it would release the Stena Impero only after its own vessel reached its destination. U.S. and U.K. officials have said the Adrian Darya 1 unloaded its crude to Syria despite Iranian assurances. Tehran has said the oil was sold to a third party but gave no details.
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“The legal process has finished and based on that the conditions for letting the oil tanker go free have been fulfilled and the oil tanker can move,”
Ali Rabiei,
Iran’s government spokesman, said Monday, according to the official IRNA news agency.
Allahmorad Afifipour, the head of the Ports and Maritime Organisation of Iran in Hormozgan Province, said the ship would soon leave the port of Bandar Abbas and head to international waters.
A spokesman for the Swedish owners of the Stena Impero said Monday Iranian authorities hadn’t notified the company that the tanker was free to leave. The “vessel is still being held,” he said.
However, Stena Bulk Chief Executive
Erik Hanell
had told a Swedish public broadcaster late Sunday that the company had received information that its tanker would be released soon. “So we understand that the political decision to release the ship has been taken,” he said.
A British Foreign Office official said it was monitoring the situation closely.
“We continue to call on Iran to immediately release the Stena Impero and her remaining crew, who continue to be illegally detained,” the foreign office said in a statement.
The tanker crisis soured relations between Iran and the U.K. as the Trump administration pressures European allies to join its maximum-pressure campaign to isolate Tehran. The U.S. imposed crippling economic sanctions on Iran after withdrawing from the 2015 multilateral nuclear accord last year. But the European countries have worked to keep the deal alive.
The U.K.’s new government, despite seeking close ties with the Trump administration, has continued to stand by the agreement, with Foreign Secretary
Dominic Raab
repeatedly saying the accord serves Europe’s security interests.
A boat operated by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps sailed near the Stena Impero on Aug. 22.
Photo:
wana news agency/Reuters
But tensions in the region escalated after drone and missile attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities earlier this month took out half the kingdom’s production. U.S. officials blamed Iran for the attacks, and Washington is seeking to build an international coalition to exert pressure on Tehran. The U.N.’s General Assembly—for which world leaders including President Trump and Iranian President
Hassan Rouhani
are gathering—could provide a critical forum for the Trump administration’s attempts.
European countries haven’t blamed Iran for the Saudi attacks, stressing that time is needed to unearth all the facts. But they also have cast doubt on claims from Yemen’s Houthi rebels that they were behind them.
Iranian Foreign Minister
Javad Zarif
is expected to meet the remaining parties to the nuclear deal—Germany, France, U.K., China and Russia—on Wednesday. He and Mr. Rouhani also will hold bilateral talks during the summit.
Before the Stena Impero’s release, the U.K. had said it would raise the issue at the U.N. summit.
The strikes in Saudi Arabia and the British-flagged vessel’s seizure come after several attacks on commercial tankers in the Gulf of Oman, which the U.S. accused Iran of orchestrating. Tehran denied the allegation. The incidents compounded the risk for commercial shipping in the region, raising shipping premiums and pushing some vessel owners to avoid the region.
The U.K., meanwhile, sent a second warship to protect British vessels in the area and said it would join a U.S.-led coalition to protect maritime traffic there.
The standoff weighed on European efforts to provide Iran with relief from economic sanctions and salvage the nuclear deal. Tehran in recent months has breached some of the deal’s terms after accusing the European parties—the U.K., Germany and France—of not doing enough to ensure Iran got the economic benefits it was from promised for curtailing its nuclear activities.
Diplomatic relations between the U.K. and Iran have been further strained by the Islamic Republic’s detention of several British-Iranians in its notorious Evin Prison. Iran has held charity worker
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
since 2016 and recently arrested anthropologist
Kameel Ahmady.
It also in July arrested another European dual-national, French-Iranian academic
Fariba Adelkhah,
on unspecified charges.
U.S. sanctions have hit the Iranian industries hard, particularly oil exports, which Washington says it wants to slash to zero.
The seizure of the Iranian oil by Gibraltar was particularly damaging, as Iran’s oil exports have fallen as low as 200,000 barrels a day, mostly to China and Syria, compared with 2.5 million barrels a day before the latest round of sanctions.
To that extent, the Iranian tanker’s release from Gibraltar was a setback for the U.S.’s attempts to enforce American sanctions in international maritime waters.
Iran and the U.K. didn’t say if the release of the British-flagged vessel was linked to the Iranian tanker’s freedom. But Iranian officials have previously indicated such a move would help end the detention of the Stena Impero.
The seizure of the Iranian tanker also infuriated many Iranians who saw in it a historical echo of London’s attempts to dominate Iranian oil, especially its efforts to block a nationalization of it in the 1950s, which led to the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected prime minister.
—Benoit Faucon in London, Laurence Norman and Costas Paris in New York and Aresu Eqbali in Tehran contributed to this article.
A British-flagged tanker that Iran seized in July is now free to leave, the Iranian government said on Monday, more than a month after British authorities released an Iranian tanker that had been detained off Gibraltar.
The news offered a rare hint of easing tensions, at a time when Iran has been in an escalating cycle of confrontation with its Persian Gulf neighbors and the United States.
Iran had accused the British-flagged tanker, the Stena Impero, of violating maritime regulations in the Strait of Hormuz, but the seizure on July 19 was widely seen as retaliation for the detention of the Iranian tanker.
The legal proceedings against the Stena Impero have concluded, and Iran has decided to waive alleged violations, an Iranian government spokesman, Ali Rabiyee, said at a news conference, according to Iranian and Western news agencies that were present.
The ship had not left the Bandar Abbas, a port in southern Iran, as of midday, and it was not clear how quickly it would set sail. Erik Hanell, chief executive of the tanker’s owner, the shipping company Stena Bulk, told SVT, a Swedish television station, that he hoped it would be a matter of hours.
Iran detained the 23-member crew along with the ship. It released seven of them earlier this month, but the others have remained with the vessel.
A number of civilians have been killed in an air raid and ground assault on a Taliban hideout by Afghan special forces in the southern Helmand province.
There were conflicting reports on the number of people killed and wounded in the operation on Sunday night in Musa Qala district, which is under Taliban control.
Officials said the civilians killed were part of a wedding procession that came under fire during the operation targeting a house used by the Taliban.
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Omar Zwak, the provincial governor's spokesman, told Al Jazeera on Monday at least 14 fighters including six foreigners were killed, adding that authorities were investigating reports on civilian casualties.
"We know there have been civilian deaths in this raid but we don't have a number yet," he said. "However, we are investigating to find out more."
Attaullah Afghan, a member of the Helmand provincial council, told Reuters news agency that 35 civilians were killed and 13 wounded.
Abdul Majed Akhund, deputy provincial councilman, told The Associated Press news agency authorities were investigating reports that at least 24 people attending a wedding died in the raid.
Afghanistan's security forces have been heavily criticised for inflicting civilian casualties during night-time raids.
Afghan and allied international forces, including NATO, have killed more civilians in the first three months of this year than the Taliban and fighters from other armed groups, a UN report said in April.
At least 305 civilians have been killed by pro-government forces between January and March, 52.5 percent of all deaths in that period, according to findings from the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).
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In one of the most condemned incidents earlier this month, four brothers were killed in a raid conducted by the CIA-trained and funded 02 Unit of Afghanistan's spy agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS).
On Friday, the US confirmed carrying out a drone attack on September 19 that killed at least 30 farmers in Nangarhar province. At least 40 others were wounded in the attack in Wazir Tangi area of Khogyani district.
The United States and the Taliban began peace talks last October in Qatar, with the aim of ending the almost 18-year-old war in Afghanistan.
But in a surprise move, US President Donald Trump announced last month after the nine round of talks that negotiations were cancelled without a deal.
A week after the talks were cancelled, Trump said in a tweet that the Taliban have "never been hit harder".
"After Trump cancelling the peace deal with the Taliban, there has been increase in drone attacks and ground operations, that is causing increase in civilian casualties," Faizullah Zaland, a political analyst based in Kabul, told Al Jazeera.
"It wil deepen mistrust among people in the Afghan government and will deepen the current crisis,"
"US must play a more responsible role in ending the meaningless war and prevent Afghan civilian casualties with immediate effect," he said.
Afghanistan will hold its fourth presidential elections on September 28 since US-led forces toppled the Taliban from power in 2001.
Rudy Giuliani channeled President Trump Monday with a wee-hours Twitter blitz aimed at turning the Ukraine story currently roiling Washington into a big problem for Democrats.
Giuliani, the personal attorney for Trump and outspoken critic of Joe Biden and his son’s relationship with Ukraine, accused Kiev of laundering $3 million to Hunter Biden, suggested that the Obama administration turned a blind eye and made the prediction that the scandal is in its infancy.
"If Dem party doesn’t call for an investigation of Bidens’ millions from Ukraine and billions from China, they will own it,” he tweeted. "Bidens’ made big money selling public office. How could Obama have allowed this to happen? Will Dems continue to condone and enable this kind pay-for-play?"
Giuliani titled his first tweet, "NEW FACT," and said Hunter Biden received a one-time payment of $3 million from the Ukraine that went through Latvia and then to Cyprus, before entering the U.S.
Giuliani did not provide how he learned about the purported transaction but said prosecutors were stonewalled at the time when they inquired about the sum.
"Did Obama know that his VP, the one he put in charge of giving billions to Ukraine, had a son who was making millions on the board of one of the most corrupt companies in Ukraine," he tweeted. "[Hunter] Biden’s boss had stolen $5b from Ukraine and was a fugitive. Did Obama know? Did he approve?"
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Trump asked his Ukranian counterpart to investigate Hunter Biden, who had a key role in a natural gas firm, Burisma Holdings, that was being investigated by a Ukrainian prosecutor as part of a corruption probe. Hunter Biden has not been accused of wrongdoing during his time at the company where he made $50,000 a month as a member of the board of directors, according to the New York Times. Up until his role on the board, Hunter Biden has no experience in Ukraine, the Times reported.
At a conference two years after he left office, Joe Biden openly boasted about successfully pressuring Ukraine to fire that prosecutor when he was vice president.
Trump on Sunday appeared to confirm that he spoke about Joe Biden with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but insisted that the call was routine. Democrats seized on his admission and some renewed calls for his impeachment. Political observers raised questions as to why Trump would allow himself to get into a position that it could even appear like he is seeking help from a foreign power to achieve political ends.
Giuliani, like many Trump supporters, stressed that the story is not the phone calls, rather the crony capitalism on display where the son of a sitting vice president could make millions working on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
Trump accused Joe Biden of dishonesty in claiming that he never spoke to his son about his business dealings with a Ukrainian energy company, despite Hunter Biden telling the New Yorker that they spoke “just once” about it.
