The camps in remote Badakhshan province supported the Taliban and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement — set up by members of China’s minority Uighur community.
The U. S. military says it carried out a series of punishing bombings last weekend of Taliban militant camps that also support a separatist Chinese terror group.
A bombing raid Sunday on a region bordering China and Tajikistan set a record for the number of precision-guided munitions launched at one time from a B-52 bomber, according to Air Force Maj. Gen. James Hecker, who spoke to reporters at the Pentagon in a video teleconference from Kabul on Wednesday. The B-52 — a Cold War workhorse — had recently been modified to carry more munitions, the military said in a statement.
The camps in remote Badakhshan Province supported Taliban operations within Afghanistan and by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement — set up by members of China’s minority Uighur community — on the border region with China and Tajikistan, the military said.
“There will be no safe haven for any terrorist group,” Gen. John Nicholson, the head of U. S. Forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement Thursday. “We continue to hunt them across the country.”
Hecker said the strikes “support Afghanistan in reassuring its neighbors that it is not a safe sanctuary for terrorists who want to carry out cross border operations.
