Papers Give Peek Inside Al Qaeda in Iraq
By Michael Ware
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/06/11/al.qaeda.iraq/index.htmlEditor's Note: In this exclusive report, CNN's Michael Ware examines the largest collection of al Qaeda in Iraq documents ever to fall into civilian hands, discovering surprises about how the insurgents operate and clues about their strength today.
With Christmas 2005 approaching, the princes of al Qaeda's western command were gathering. They'd been summoned for something special: to plot a three-month campaign of coordinated suicide, rocket and infantry attacks on American bases, checkpoints and Iraqi army positions.
In al Qaeda in Iraq's hierarchy, prince designates a senior leader, and these princes had been gathered by the most senior among them, the prince of Anbar province itself.
This commander, his name not recorded in al Qaeda's summaries of the meetings and referred to only by rank, spent that December fleshing out his vision for the wave of assaults with the gathered subordinates who would lead his combat brigades.
The gathering was a council of war, its meetings remarkably detailed in al Qaeda records. In minutes of their secretive meetings, a grim notation was made: Operation Desert Shield had been approved and would "hopefully commence in mid-January 2006." Watch how al Qaeda used videoed executions in their battle (Warning: This report contains graphic images) »
With the operation approved, the prince of Anbar listened to the briefings of his assembled commanders: the chairmen of both his military and his security committees, plus the various princes from the sectors he controlled -- Falluja, Ramadi, Anbar-West and Anbar-Central. All boundary demarcations strikingly similar to those used by the American soldiers they were fighting.
The overall plan, too, was similar to any that the U.S. army would devise. First, the military committee chairman outlined plans to seal off the U.S. targets as much as possible by harassing supply lines, damaging bridges and targeting helicopters and their landing zones, in a bid to restrict reinforcement or resupply.
Then the security chairman spoke of the need to maintain strict "operational security," ordaining that only the princes, or leaders, involved in the meetings be informed of the grand strategy, leaving cell leaders and battalion commanders to believe their individual attacks were being launched in isolation.
All this would be Phase I, a precursor to the 90 days of attacks of Phase II, to be timed across not just Anbar but across much of Sunni Iraq to stretch and distract America's war commander, Gen. David Petraeus.
Flowing from the memo approving Operation Desert Shield, a stream of reports follow.
On January 7, 2006, a memo called for Iraqis who'd infiltrated various U.S. bases to conduct site surveys to help identify the camps that would be hit. The two-page note also spoke of placing ammunition stores well in advance of the attacks so the fighters could resort to them during the battles.
The January memo also commented on training and rehearsals for the offensive and the extraction routes their fighters would use after the attacks, and it dictated the need to obtain pledges from the foot soldiers of their willingness to die.
In another memo, reports were compiled from al Qaeda field commanders recommending which U.S. Army and Marine bases or Iraqi checkpoints or police stations should be targeted. Baghdad International Airport was one of the targets named. Beside each entry were notes on weapons each target would require: Grad surface-to-surface missiles, Katyusha rockets, roadside bombs and suicide bombers.
Phase II, the 90-day offensive, commenced around March 2006, with al Qaeda's records from Anbar that month reading like a litany of what the U.S. Army would call AARs, or After Action Reports, listing each attack's successes and failures. It also noted the losses suffered by both al Qaeda or, in what Americans would call Battle Damage Assessments, the losses suffered by the coalition.
Al Qaeda's folder on Operation Desert Shield expresses the depth, structure and measure of its military command. It is perhaps the most compelling illustration of how al Qaeda works.
Yet the Desert Shield folder is but one found among the thousands of pages of records, letters, lists and hundreds of videos held in the headquarters of al Qaeda's security prince for Anbar province, a man referred to in secret correspondence as Faris Abu Azzam.
After he was killed 18 months ago, Faris' computers and filing cabinets were captured by anti-al Qaeda fighters from a U.S-backed militia, or Awakening Council (the militias made up of former Sunni insurgents, now on the U.S. payroll and praised by President Bush for gutting al Qaeda in Iraq). The Awakening militiamen handed the massive haul of al Qaeda materials to both their U.S handlers from the Navy, Marine Corps and Army, and to CNN.
In all, these Anbar files form the largest collection of al Qaeda in Iraq materials to ever fall into civilian hands, giving an insight into the organization that few but its members or Western intelligence agents have ever seen.
Rear Adm. Patrick Driscoll, the American military's spokesman in Baghdad, says the document trove is unique, "a kind of comprehensive snapshot" of al-Qaeda during its peak.
"It reveals," Driscoll said, "first of all, a pretty robust command and control system, if you will. I was kind of surprised when I saw the degree of documentation for everything -- pay records, those kind of things -- and that [al Qaeda in Iraq] was obviously a well-established network."
That network is now under enormous stress, primarily from the more than 100,000 nationalist insurgents who formed the Awakening Council militias and initiated an extremely effective assassination program against al Qaeda, but also from recent U.S. and Iraqi government strikes into their strongholds.
As a result, says Lt. Col. Tim Albers, the coalition's director of military intelligence for Baghdad, "al Qaeda in Iraq is fighting to stay relevant."
So, what do these captured documents from 2006 tell us about al Qaeda in Iraq today? A lot, according to a senior U.S. intelligence analyst in Iraq, who cannot be named because of the sensitivity of his position.
"We're still finding documents like these throughout the country, but I would say that's starting to lessen in amount as the organization shrinks," the analyst said.
The al Qaeda command mechanism and discipline seen in the documents, he said, persist.
"The hard-core senior leadership is still trucking along, and there are always going to be internal communications, documents and videos," he said.
With as many as six suicide attacks and three car bombings in the past 10 days in Iraq (including one attack that killed a U.S. soldier and wounded 18 others), Driscoll agrees the picture the documents paint of a well-oiled, bureaucratic organization is relevant today.
"Certainly, we see that in several different ways how they communicate ... as they've got to be able to talk to their troops in the field to maintain morale, especially when we're pursuing them very aggressively," Driscoll said.
Be it then, in 2006, or be it now, al Qaeda in Iraq is nothing if not bureaucratic.
Included in the headquarters of the security prince, Faris, are bundles of pay sheets for entire brigades, hundreds of men carved into infantry battalions and a fire support -- or rocket and mortar -- battalion. To join those ranks, recruits had to complete membership forms.
"These are the application forms filled in by the people who join al Qaeda," Abu Saif said, holding one of the documents obtained by CNN. Until recently, Abu Saif was himself a senior-level al Qaeda commander.
"They took information about [the recruits], and if the applicant lied about something -- because they were investigated -- they would whip him," Abu Saif said.
Induction into al Qaeda, he said, would take up to four months. In one case, Abu Saif recounted, an applicant lived for four months at the home of what he thought was a local supporter of the organization providing a safe house. Finally accepted and called to a cell leaders' meeting, he discovered that his host was actually a senior recruiter who'd been studying his every move for those four months.
Al Qaeda's bookkeeping was orderly and expansive: death lists of opponents, rosters of prisoners al Qaeda was holding, along with the verdicts and sentences (normally execution) the prisoners received, plus phone numbers from a telephone exchange of those who'd called the American tip line to inform on insurgents, and motor pool records of vehicle roadworthiness.
And there are telling papers with a window into al Qaeda's ability to spy on its pursuers. One is a document leaked from the Ministry of Interior naming all the foreign fighters held in government prisons. Other documents discuss lessons al Qaeda learned from its members captured by American forces and either released or still in U.S.-run prisons. The leadership studied and discussed the nature of the American interrogations, the questioning techniques used and the methods that had been employed to ensnare its men.
And an Iraqi contractor even wrote the Anbar security prince, asking permission to oversee a $600,000 building project on a U.S. base, attaching the architectural drawings of the bunkers he was to make, with an offer to spy and steal weapons during the construction.
It seems al Qaeda in Iraq is almost as pedantically bureaucratic as was Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party, a trait that really shouldn't surprise.
Though al Qaeda was denied a foothold in Iraq during Hussein's regime, with its ideology unappealing to the mostly secular professional military officers in the former dictator's armies, that has now changed.
According to the internal al Qaeda correspondence in the files, Iraqis have taken to, and effectively run, al Qaeda in Iraq. Foreign fighters' roles seem mostly relegated to the canon fodder of suicide attacks.
Though the upper tiers of the organization are still dominated by non-Iraqis, in Anbar, at least, all the princes and brigade and battalion commanders are homegrown.
"Correct. They're all Iraqis," Abu Saif said. "In my house [one time], there were about 18 Arab fighters under Iraqi commander Omar Hadid, mercy of God upon him, and the [foreigners] did not object, they just did their duty."
That Iraqification of the network is what perhaps enabled al Qaeda to foresee its demise years before the Americans did.
Documents from 2005 and 2006 show that top-ranking leaders feared the imposition of strict religious law and brutal tactics were turning their popular support base against them.
One memorandum from three years ago warned executions of traitors and sinners condemned by religious courts "were being carried out in the wrong way, in a semi-public way, so a lot of families are threatening revenge, and this is now a dangerous intelligence situation."
That awareness led al Qaeda to start killing tribesmen and nationalist insurgents wherever they began to rally against it, long before America ever realized that it had potential allies to turn to.
Yet those same practices that accelerated al Qaeda in Iraq's undoing were breathtakingly documented.
In a vein similar to the Khmer Rouge's grisly accounting of its torture victims, within the files of one al Qaeda headquarters in Anbar alone was a library of 80 execution videos, mostly beheadings, none of which had been distributed or released on the Internet. And all were filmed after al Qaeda in Iraq ended its policy of broadcasting such horrors.
So why keep filming? According to former member Abu Saif and the senior U.S. intelligence analyst, to verify the deaths to al Qaeda superiors and to justify continued funding and support.
The videos also bear insight into al Qaeda's media units. Raw video among the catalog of beheadings shows how al Qaeda's editing skills hide not just its members' faces (caught in candid moments on the un-edited films) but also their failures.
When three Russian diplomats were kidnapped and killed in June 2006, a well-polished propaganda piece was released. It showed two diplomats being gruesomely beheaded, and yet the third diplomat was shot with a pistol, in a different location. The full video of the slayings answers why.
Though bound and blindfolded, the third diplomat struggled so defiantly that his ailing executioners could not draw their knife across his throat. In the horrific and chaotic scenes, the faces of his killer and the cameraman are seen.
And those scenes, like the intricacy of the prince of Anbar's planning and internal analysis of Operation Desert Shield, reveal an al Qaeda in Iraq that the world still barely knows.
Experts Fear New Front with Al-Qaida as Terror Group Switches Focus from Iraq
Ian Black and Richard Norton-Taylor
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/11/alqaida.terrorismLast month an Arabic satellite TV channel broadcast a chilling video of a group of Iraqi teenagers called the "Youths of Heaven" - their faces masked and brandishing Kalashnikov rifles, chanting "Allahu Akbar" and vowing to blow themselves up with "crusaders and apostates." The film of these aspiring suicide bombers, all said to be under 16, was produced by al-Furqan, the media arm of the Islamic State of Iraq, aka al-Qaida. But such material is rare these days, with film coming out of Iraq looking suspiciously like posed training sessions with little of the live action of ambushes that has been the staple fare of jihadi websites.
Two weeks ago, General Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, made waves when he said in an interview that al-Qaida has suffered "near-strategic defeat" in Iraq. To many observers it was a surprisingly upbeat view just a year after gloomy assessments of the dangers that Osama bin Laden still posed. In fact, few security sources - including key counter-terrorism officials canvassed by the Guardian - and independent experts disagree, though the US military is more circumspect.
Nor does anyone dispute the key fact that al-Qaida has also lost three senior commanders in its refuge in the Pakistani tribal areas (two to unmanned Predator drones) even if its "core leadership" of Bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and a couple of dozen other Egyptians and Libyans remains at large.
Evidence of al-Qaida's problems in Iraq is weighty and convincing. It has been badly hit by the fightback from the American-backed Sunni "Sons of Iraq" and the US troop "surge". Western intelligence agencies estimate that the number of foreign fighters is down to single figures each month. The border with Syria is now harder to cross.
Iraq-watchers point, too, to financial strain caused by the arrests of al-Qaida sympathisers in Saudi Arabia, mafia-like disputes over alcohol licences and difficulties recruiting the right calibre of people. Last month, a sympathetic website carried a study showing a 94% decline in operations over a year. The Islamic State of Iraq claimed 334 operations in November 2006 but just 25 a year later. Attacks dropped from 292 in May 2007 to 16 by mid-May this year.
Dia Rashwan, an Egyptian expert on radical Islamists, says recent al-Qaida propaganda footage from Iraq is old and cannot mask the crisis it is facing. "They have not got new things to say about Iraq though they are trying to give the impression that they are still alive. The material isn't convincing." Nigel Inkster, former deputy head of MI6, now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, agrees: "Al-Qaida is starting to prepare their people for strategic failure in Iraq."
Al-Qaida is also perceived as being "on the back foot" because of attacks by Muslim clerics on its takfiri ideology and revulsion at the killing of innocent Muslims. Participants in Zawahiri's recent "open dialogue" on Islamist websites compared al-Qaida's performance unfavourably with the successes of Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon.
Challenges to the use of violence by Sayid Imam al-Sharif, founder of the Egyptian Jihad group, have rattled his old colleague Zawahiri, says Rashwan. Influential Saudi clerics have helped undercut al-Qaida's theological arguments. How far such rarified debates affect radicalised Muslim youth in Bradford or Madrid is a different question.
European security sources say there is no evidence al-Qaida is losing its influence among target or vulnerable groups. "They have lost top people but this will not degrade in the long term their overall capabilities," says one British counter-terrorism official. Officials say the number of UK-born suspected al-Qaida sympathisers travelling to Pakistan - "but not in droves" - has remained constant.
Key will be the relations between al-Qaida, tribal leaders of north-west Pakistan and figures such as Baitullah Mehsoud, accused of being responsible for the death of Benazir Bhutto last year. But al-Qaida's influence in southern Afghanistan is said to be diminishing, disrupted by Nato, the US, military activity and money.
Officials talk about the appeal of an "attractive area of ungoverned space". This is Somalia, described as an increasingly popular destination for "western jihadists", though al-Qaida is playing only a small part in the violence there, western intelligence officials suggest.
Of more immediate concern is north Africa. Algeria is a growth area a year after the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GPSC) renamed itself al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, a move seen as flattering recognition of a uniquely successful global franchise. Five bombings in the last week alone have been troubling reminders that it is far from being defeated. Experts are divided about the link between local and wider factors but there is evidence of internet and telephone connections with the "core leadership" in Pakistan, with Zawahiri taking "a close interest."
There is concern, too, about a possible "blowback" effect as al-Qaida leaders encourage supporters in Pakistan and "veterans" of Iraq and Afghanistan to return to their home countries. Not everyone agrees al-Qaida has suffered "near defeat" in Saudi Arabia, Bin Laden's homeland. The Saudis have created a successful counter-radicalisation programme that has "turned" returning jihadis. But fears are growing about al-Qaida in Yemen, a weak and tribal state on the tip of the Arabian peninsula (and with easy access to Somalia), that may be becoming a new "back door" into the oil-rich kingdom.
The mood of al-Qaida watchers is cautious. "We are in a theological war so if the frame of reference is changing, that's good," says one counter-terrorist expert. "But look: Bin Laden called for action against Denmark because of the Muhammad cartoons and pulled it off by bombing the Danish embassy in Islamabad. The message got across efficiently. People say, 'Don't overreact to what bin Laden says.' But actually he says he's going to do something and usually it's done. So long as that remains the case we have a problem."
Still, a recent posting on a jihadist website threatened an attack bigger than 9/11 before George Bush leaves office. No one is yet writing obituaries for Bin Laden or al-Qaida.
Rashwan says Gen Hayden is wrong to play down al-Qaida's strengths in Afghanistan and Algeria. "Just because the CIA says al-Qaida has been defeated it's not thanks to the efforts of the Americans. The al-Qaida idea will not die if American foreign policy remains the same in the Middle East and the Muslim world. If there is another administration like Bush in Iraq and a new war in Iran, it will get a new lease of life."
Al-Qaeda’s Vietnam
An Islamist backlash.
By Rich Lowry
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGI0ZTk2ZjhlMTQxMzA4MzkwYjhjNjBiYTE3MTViMTA=Lately, the Iraq war has looked more and more like another Vietnam — not for us, but for al-Qaeda.
CIA Director Michael Hayden says the terror group has suffered “near-strategic defeat” in Iraq. It has been routed from Anbar, Diyala, and Baghdad provinces, and now is getting a beating in its last stronghold of Mosul, in the north. It is reviled by the Iraqi populace, and its downward trajectory began with indigenous uprisings at its expense.
When the United States lost Vietnam, it lost credibility and saw an emboldened Marxist-Leninist offensive around the third world. Al-Qaeda is a global insurgency and not a nation-state — and thus its circumstances are radically different from ours 40 years ago — but it has suffered a similar reputational loss.
The Iraq war had been a powerful recruiting tool for al-Qaeda when it was winning. No more. Osama bin Laden rendered what is called the “bandwagon effect” in international relations — the tendency of states to go along with the dominant power — in his homespun Arabic analogy of people liking the strong horse over the weak horse. In Iraq, al-Qaeda’s proverbial horse is a broken-down nag.
Our loss in Vietnam forever shattered the domestic consensus in favor of the Cold War, creating a crisis of national confidence known as the Vietnam Syndrome. Al-Qaeda’s troubles in Iraq correspond with a similar unraveling of its ideological cohesion. Reports in The New Yorker and The New Republic recently have detailed an Islamist backlash against al-Qaeda’s indiscriminate killing, partly attributable to its brutish campaign in Iraq.
A group devoted to overthrowing secular Arab rulers and fighting America has overwhelmingly identified itself with the mass slaughter of Muslim innocents. Its methods might not have produced revulsion in the broader Muslim world if they were succeeding. Instead, in Iraq, it’s been wanton murder in a losing cause.
Like we did in Vietnam, al-Qaeda in Iraq has run afoul of nationalism and local culture, although in spectacular fashion. It has trampled on the prerogatives of tribal sheiks and issued lunatic decrees, like its banning of the local bread in Mosul — sammoun — because it did not exist at the time of the Prophet.
Like we did in Vietnam, it overrelied on favored tactics even after they proved ineffective or counterproductive; with us, it was ever more bombing runs in the North and search-and-destroy missions in the South, while in al-Qaeda’s it has been mass-casualty suicide bombings.
Like we were in Vietnam, al-Qaeda was sucked into a conflict not of its choosing by the geopolitical assertion of its adversary.
The U.S. could have ignored North Vietnam’s assault on the South as a marginal loss on the strategic periphery of the Cold War. Since Iraq is central to the Middle East and one of the three most important Arab countries, al-Qaeda could not tolerate our attempt to establish it as a democratic ally in the war on terror. It would have been like the Cold War-era U.S. writing off a Communist takeover of West Germany.
If Vietnam was arguably a winnable war for the U.S. — once we established a respectable South Vietnamese army backed by our air power — Iraq was winnable for al-Qaeda. In the chaos and civil war it stoked in Iraq in 2006, it came close to collapsing our war effort, and has exacted a stiff price for our intervention there.
The group remains dangerous, and — if we throw away the gains we’ve made with a rapid withdrawal — could mount a comeback in Iraq. Regardless, it still has its redoubt in western Pakistan. Suffering a Vietnam needn’t mean a larger strategic defeat, as we ourselves learned. But the United States had the enormous resources of the world’s largest and freest economy, and the essential justness of its cause. Al-Qaeda has neither, just the animating hatreds that have been put on such stark, unflattering display during its Vietnam
An Enemy on the Run
In Afghanistan, the Challenge Beyond al-Qaeda
By David Ignatius
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/02/AR2008050203444.htmlJALALABAD, Afghanistan -- The most interesting discovery during a visit to this city where Osama bin Laden planted his flag in 1996 is that al-Qaeda seems to have all but disappeared. The group is on the run, too, in Iraq, and that raises some interesting questions about how to pursue this terrorist enemy.
"Al-Qaeda is not a topic of conversation here," says Col. Mark Johnstone, the deputy commander of Task Force Bayonet, which oversees four provinces surrounding Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. Lt. Col. Pete Benchoff agrees: "We're not seeing a lot of al-Qaeda fighters. They've shifted here to facilitation and support."
You hear the same story farther north from the officers who oversee the provinces along the Pakistan border. A survey conducted last November and December in Nuristan, once an al-Qaeda stronghold, found that the group barely registered as a security concern among the population.
The enemy in these eastern provinces is a loose amalgam of insurgent groups, mostly linked to traditional warlords. It's not the Taliban, much less al-Qaeda. "I don't use the word 'Taliban,' " says Alison Blosser, a State Department political adviser to the military commanders here in the sector known as Regional Command East. "In RC East we have a number of disparate groups. Command and control are not linked up. The young men will fight for whoever is paying the highest rate."
The picture appears much the same in RC South, where British and Canadian troops have faced some of the toughest battles of the war. Members of the British-led Provincial Reconstruction Team in Helmand province describe an insurgency that is tied to the opium mafia -- hardly a bastion of Islamic fundamentalism.
Traveling to the British headquarters in Lashkar Gah in a low-flying Lynx helicopter, you fly over mile after mile of poppy fields -- and hundreds of Afghan men in turbans and baggy trousers out harvesting the resin that will be turned into opium. British military officers and diplomats describe the core problems in their sector as bad governance, corruption and lack of economic development, not a resurgent al-Qaeda or Taliban.
Terrorist attacks such as last week's assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai demonstrate that insurgents are still able to create havoc. Indeed, the statistics gathered by the NATO-led coalition show that civilian and military casualties are up this year. That instability undermines the good work of the development projects. But commanders say it's spasmodic violence, rather than a sustained and coordinated campaign by a tightly knit al-Qaeda.
Traveling in Iraq this year, I've heard similar accounts of al-Qaeda's demise there. That stems from two factors: the revolt by Sunni tribal leaders against al-Qaeda's brutal intimidation and the relentless hunt for its operatives by U.S. Special Forces. As the flow of human and technical intelligence improves and the United States learns to fuse it for quick use by soldiers on the ground, the anti-terrorist rollback accelerates.
The al-Qaeda menace hasn't disappeared, but it has moved -- to Pakistan. The latest State Department terrorism report, issued last week, says the group "has reconstituted some of its pre-9/11 operational capabilities through the exploitation of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas."
This evidence from the field suggests two conclusions:
First, al-Qaeda isn't a permanent boogeyman; it's losing ground in Iraq and Afghanistan because of U.S. counterinsurgency tactics, especially the alliances we have built with tribal leaders and the aggressive use of Special Forces to capture or kill its operatives. These anti-terrorist operations require special skills -- but they shouldn't require a big, semi-permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq or Afghanistan. Local security forces can handle a growing share of responsibility -- perhaps ineptly, as in Basra a few weeks ago or in Kabul last weekend, but that's their problem.
Second, the essential mission in combating al-Qaeda now is to adopt in Pakistan the tactics that are working in Iraq and Afghanistan. This means alliances with tribal warlords to bring economic development to the isolated mountain valleys of the FATA region in exchange for their help in security. And it means joint operations involving U.S. and Pakistani special forces to chase al-Qaeda militants as they retreat deeper into the mountains.
The solution isn't to send a large number of U.S. soldiers into Pakistan -- indeed, that could actually make the situation worse -- but to send the right ones, with the right skills.
Taliban Forced Back in Kandahar Offensive
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/06/19/afghanistan.taleban/index.html?eref=rss_worldAfghan and NATO forces have pushed the Taliban out of several villages in southern Afghanistan they claimed to have seized, the governor of Kandahar province said Thursday.
More than 100 Taliban fighters were killed or wounded in the operation, said Gov. Assadullah Khalid, and many others have fled.
Hundreds of Taliban militants streamed into several villages in Kandahar days ago, after 400 militants escaped from prison in a daring and well-executed jailbreak.
In response, NATO aircraft dropped hundreds of leaflets advising residents to stay inside and saying that troops were "coming to remove the enemies of Afghanistan." Then military convoys rolled into the district.
Afghan soldiers and police, along with NATO-led forces, started the military operation Wednesday. At least 34 militants were killed and another 60 wounded in the early stages of the assault, Afghan police said.
"This clearing operation is a response to a direct Taliban threat to the people of Arghandab district, where insurgents have forced hundreds of innocent Afghans to flee their homes," read a statement from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
Locals said the Taliban had seized from five to 13 villages, but an ISAF spokesman said reports of militants overrunning villages was Taliban "propaganda precisely to scare people."
The villages are about 12 miles (20 km) north of Kandahar, near the prison. Kandahar province is where the Taliban first rose to power and where it made its last stand before being toppled by U.S.-led forces in late 2001.
In an earlier operation, two Afghan soldiers and at least 23 militants were killed Wednesday during an attempt to flush rebels out of several villages in the south of the country, the Afghan defense ministry said.
Afghan troops, backed by Canadian forces, targeted villages in the Arghandab district of Kandahar province, where 400 militants escaped from prison in a jailbreak Friday.
On Tuesday four British soldiers were in a separate operation in Lashkar Gah, also in southern Afghanistan.
And in another incident on Wednesday, two NATO-led soldiers were killed and 10 wounded during a patrol in southeastern Afghanistan. The incident occurred in the Paktika province, the alliance force said without releasing the nationalities of these troops. Watch as Taliban makes comeback »
Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Zahir Azimi said thousands of soldiers and police officers -- with reinforcements from the capital city of Kabul -- began moving into Arghandab Wednesday morning.
"This clearing operation is a response to a direct Taliban threat to the people of Arghandab district, where insurgents have forced hundreds of innocent Afghans to flee their homes," a statement from NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said. "The operation is expected to be completed within the next three days."
The two Afghan soldiers were killed in a gun battle with three Taliban fighters, the defense ministry said. A NATO air raid in the district killed 20 other militants, the ministry said.
Even with the operation under way, NATO said it had seen no evidence of an increased Taliban presence in the region.
"The scale of the challenge is currently unknown," ISAF spokesman Mark Laity said. "What we failed to find is the large grouping [of militants] that some people claimed."
Laity said the reports of militants overrunning villages was Taliban "propaganda precisely to scare people."
Throughout the night and into early Wednesday morning, residents reported seeing row upon row of military convoys moving into the district. As the operation got under way, planes and helicopters buzzed overhead.
Local elders said hundreds of militants streamed into the villages late Sunday night on motor bikes and pickups. Then, in apparent preparation for an impending military operation, they planted mines, destroyed bridges and forced villagers to stay and fight alongside them, a tribal elder said.
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