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November 30, 2001
WASHINGTON -- Two lists are kept at the command center for the war in Afghanistan: one with al-Qaida leaders that marks them "inj" for injured or "kia" for killed.
The other is for the Taliban, color-coded to show those defecting, injured or negotiating to surrender -- targets for questioning by Americans in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
"There have been defections ... of some of the more senior people," Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said Thursday. She declined to name them or give their positions.
Among those the Pentagon would like to interrogate are two Taliban ministers, including intelligence chief Qari Ahmadulla.
The Associated Press reported that a U.S. official said there were credible reports that Ahmadulla had defected to the Northern Alliance.
But a defense official said Ahmadulla was still negotiating for his surrender in Kandahar, the southern Taliban stronghold that tribal leaders have been fighting to take over.
U.S. troops have been allowed by opposition groups to question other defectors and prisoners who have surrendered or been captured, the AP reported a senior defense official as saying.
The hope is that they can provide crucial information that will lead to finding Taliban and al-Qaida leaders, as well as sites they may use to hide weapons stashes and financial records.
The Pentagon is just starting to receive and evaluate the information from such interrogations, the official said, declining to say who had been questioned.
Of the more than three dozen Taliban members whom the Pentagon has on its list, some 12 have been killed, injured or have defected, the AP reported, quoting a defense official who has seen it. He didn't say how many had been questioned.
The list is part of a PowerPoint computer-generated slide presentation sometimes used to brief the war's commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, at Central Command headquarters in Tampa.
As for the fate of al-Qaida figures, after nearly two months of U.S. bombing in Afghanistan, seven al-Qaida leaders and senior aides are believed killed. Many from bin Laden's top echelons are alive.
The most significant killed so far was Mohammed Atef, one of the top two advisers to bin Laden, who died in a CIA-assisted U.S. airstrike around Nov. 14. Atef was bin Laden's operational planner and believed to have supervised planning for several attacks, including the Sept. 11 attacks.
Two others considered in al-Qaida's "top 20" are believed dead after U.S. bombing in early November near the Afghan-Pakistan border, military and other officials say. They were identified as Mohammed Salah and Tariq Anwar al-Sayyid Ahmad, both from Egypt.