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U.S. troops fixing air base near Kabul for aid flights

Soldiers with the 10th Mountain Division are repairing the Bagram base and its runway.

©Associated Press

December 6, 2001

BAGRAM, Afghanistan -- There's grass growing through cracks on the runway, the main hangar's roof is pocked with holes from incoming rockets, and to step off the tarmac is to risk setting off a land mine. U.S. troops are rushing to rehabilitate the battered Soviet-era airfield they hope will soon serve as a pipeline for humanitarian aid into Afghanistan.

In nearly three weeks on the ground at Bagram air base north of Kabul, soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division and support troops have secured the airfield -- already in the hands of anti-Taliban forces -- and cleared its cavernous hangar of tons of debris and derelict equipment.

The Americans have also been working to rid the air base of mines and unexploded ordnance -- a legacy of the Russians' long war in Afghanistan and the opposition Northern Alliance's struggle to keep the Taliban from the gates.

Built as the Russians' main staging ground for ferrying in troops and equipment, Bagram -- with runways long enough to accommodate huge cargo planes -- is earmarked as a key pipeline for humanitarian aid that is expected to begin pouring in now that Afghanistan's factions have agreed on an interim government.

But there's still much work to be done to make the airfield, 25 miles north Kabul, safe. No timetable has been set for the start of aid shipments.

Bagram "has been in a high state of disrepair for many years now," said Maj. Victor Harris, a spokesman with the U.S. Central Command in Tampa.

Harris declined to specify how many American troops were at the airfield, saying only that it was "enough to do the job." More than 100 British soldiers are also on the ground at Bagram.

In addition to the Fort Drum, N.Y.-based 10th Mountain Division troops who initially secured the airport, soldiers from the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion in Fort Bragg, N.C., have been repairing the main hangar.

They have carted out tons of abandoned equipment, including the shells of half a dozen Russian fighter jets that now rest outside in a "MiG graveyard," long stripped of all their wiring and navigational gear.