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.
