Into The Fray

Every war has its fateful pivot, when the high-altitude bombs lose their persuasive power and politics becomes a sideshow, when soldiers must hit the ground and fight and everyone else braces for something terrible. This war turned last Thursday night. Throughout the day, combat helicopters had carried U.S. special-operations troops ashore from the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, anchored in the Arabian Sea off the southern coast of Pakistan. The forces choppered over miles of desert terrain to an airstrip at Dalbandin, close to Pakistan's secret underground nuclear-test site and just south of the Afghan border. There they prepared to be delivered into Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan to begin a furtive ground war in which no one knew exactly what came next.

The new stage of the war may have been prompted by a tidy piece of intelligence work. On Friday morning, Pakistani intelligence sources tell TIME, the Taliban eminence Mullah Mohammed Omar arrived in Kandahar, the regime's stronghold in southern Afghanistan. He had spent days holed up in a mountain fortress ducking U.S. bombs, and in the meantime his regime had been pummeled. When he got back to Kandahar, Omar fired two faithless deputies and passed the word that he would deliver the noon sermon at the Halqa Cherif mosque. The mosque houses a robe said to have belonged to the Prophet Muhammad, so Omar must have figured the Americans would never bomb it. U.S. commanders may have known he was there. An eyewitness told TIME that American warplanes blitzed a convoy that may have been shepherding Omar as it left Kandahar, killing several Taliban bodyguards.

Hours later, more than 100 American commandos--led by Army Rangers--lifted off in helicopters and MC-130 Combat Talon planes from bases in southern Pakistan and Oman. A military cameraman videotaped the special forces donning fatigues (the camera zoomed in on a photo of New York fire fighters that commandos had packed in their gear to leave at their destinations), boarding aircraft and leaping out in Afghanistan. While a group of commandos seized a dry-lake airstrip some 100 miles southwest of Kandahar, other troops headed to Kandahar itself in pursuit of Omar and one of his command centers. The special forces didn't manage to snare Omar, but Pentagon officials said U.S. troops gathered valuable intelligence and destroyed a small-weapons stockpile at the airfield.

But not surprisingly, the Taliban has a different story. A Taliban soldier, Abdu Rahman, 30, told TIME that two combat helicopters arrived before dawn Saturday in the desert 10 miles east of Kandahar. As one hovered overhead, a few commandos poured out of the second gunship. Hundreds of Taliban fighters, who had responded to the earsplitting whir of the choppers, were crouching in the darkness. "We were ordered to wait until the Americans came closer. But nobody listened. We were all firing," Rahman says. The American forces "flew off like sparrows."