50 insurgents killed in cave complex near Pakistan

AP/Washington Post:

International and Afghan troops battled heavily armed insurgents holed up in caves and bunkers that served as a way station for foreign fighters crossing into the country from Pakistan, the U.S.-led coalition said Friday. The two days of fighting killed more than 50 of the militants, it said.

The foreign fighter encampment is located in a rugged, mountainous part eastern Afghanistan’s Paktika province. Insurgents from the Haqqani network, which is affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaida, used the camp as a staging area for fighters brought over the border to carry out attacks across the country, the coalition said.

International forces and Afghan troops, including Afghan special forces, battled insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and AK-47 assault rifles.

The joint force recovered stockpiles of weapons, including mortars, RPGs, machine guns, crates of ammunition, AK-47s, grenades and other military gear, the coalition said.

Paktika province, along the eastern border with Pakistan, is a known haven for the Afghan and Pakistani wings of the Taliban, and al-Qaida affiliates.

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It is rare that you can find a group that large to attack anymore in Afghanistan. It is possible many of the fighters had just crossed overs and were caught at the way station. The weapons captured suggest it was an important logistics base for the enemy too.

We must have gotten some pretty good intelligence on the enemy movements or surveillance aircraft may have spotted the camp.

CNN reports the area was a transit point for the Haqqani network in Pakistan.  That makes the action all the more important since we need to cripple this group of terrorist before we leave.