A US-held airfield in eastern Afghanistan came under grenade attack last night, a US military spokesman confirmed today.
Two rocket propelled grenades were fired at the military airstrip in the border province of Khost but caused no casualties or damage.
Earlier US special forces combing cave-pocked mountains straddling the eastern border provinces of Paktia and Khost discovered "tonnes of ammunition" including two US stinger surface-to-air missiles, Lieutenant Colonel Roger King said.
The latest weapons hauls, described by Lt Col King as "significant", also included landmines, anti-tank missiles, dozens of rocket-propelled grenade launchers and rockets, 30 recoil-less rifle rounds, and numerous boxes and belts of machine gun ammunitions and mortar rounds.
"The quantity is too large to count [they were] used within the relatively recent past.
The first cache was found Saturday in Urgun, 18 miles from the porous border with Pakistan, and the second was discovered in Zamankigar, north of Urgun, on Sunday.
The seizures were comparable to the massive arms haul by British Marines in a village just north of Khost last month, when they found buildings stuffed with anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons, heavy machine guns, bomb-making equipment and booby-trapped boxes of munitions.
The hit-and-run style attacks on the Khost airfield, by unidentified groups, are becoming a weekly routine. "They are choosing Sunday nights to fire around the US-held military airfield in Khost," Lt Col King said.
AFP