BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan — A team of American soldiers completed a sweep on Saturday of a large cave network believed to have been used recently by al-Qaida and Taliban fighters, carrying away photos, dossiers and vials containing an unidentified white powder.
Some 500 troops from the Army's 101st Airborne Division arrived here on Saturday afternoon after the five-day mission, which took them into the subterranean complex in Khost Province near the border with Pakistan. The men said they had ventured into more than 15 caves, some of them hundreds of feet deep, complete with bedrooms, warehouses and even iron-barred jail cells. After cleaning out the caves, the men used C-4 explosives and antitank missiles to seal them.
When the soldiers ran out of ordnance, they marked the caves they could not destroy and brought their coordinates back to base. Apache helicopters were to go back later to finish the caves off.
"Some of the stuff looked pretty old, but the locals said Osama bin Laden had been there," said Capt. Lou Bauer, 29, of Windsor, N.Y.
The search of the caves appeared to represent a new phase in the American operation in Afghanistan. After the end of the large American operation last month in the Shah-e-Kot Valley, where hundreds of Taliban and al-Qaida fighters were thought to have been killed, American troops appear to be moving toward smaller operations against targets that are more dispersed.
In a statement Saturday, Gen. Tommy Franks, the chief commander in the war here, said that American forces had no large-scale operations against Taliban and al-Qaida forces planned soon.
The operation into the caves also represents a shift for the American troops, who left unsearched many of the caves used by Taliban and al-Qaida fighters in the Tora Bora region last December.
The American soldiers said they had destroyed the caves so they could not be used again by Taliban and al-Qaida fighters who might be trying to re-enter Afghanistan.
The caves, many of them fortified during the American-backed war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, lie just a few miles from the border with Pakistan, where hundreds of Taliban and al-Qaida fighters are believed to have fled in the past few months. The caves, which lie in a region called Zhwara, are less than 40 miles from the Shah-e-Kot Valley, from which many Taliban and al-Qaida fighters were thought to have escaped.
So far, Pakistan is off-limits to American troops, and American and Afghan officials worry that the fugitive fighters appear to be planning guerrilla attacks from their Pakistani sanctuaries. Although Pakistani officials insist that the 12,000 soldiers they have deployed in the border region are keeping a lookout for Taliban and al-Qaida fighters, there have been persistent reports that these fighters are regrouping in the largely ungoverned area.
Lounging near the airstrip of this old Soviet base, the American soldiers said it appeared that the caves had been used recently by Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. In addition to destroying several hundred rounds of mortar shells and bullets, the men said they had carted off five bags filled with documents.
Included in the haul were dozens of what appeared to be personnel files of al-Qaida and Taliban fighters, complete with mug shots and write-ups of each one. The men in the photographs appeared to be of Middle Eastern origin, the Americans said, and much of the writing in the documents appeared to be in Arabic.
There were several signs that al-Qaida or Taliban fighters had been in the caves fairly recently, the soldiers said.
One soldier said he found what appeared to be a relatively new box of 155-millimeter howitzer shells. Another said he found a body in a small mausoleum that appeared to have been recently entombed. One soldier found a copy of USA Today dated May 17, 2001.
The most intriguing discovery were dozens of vials filled with white powder.
The soldiers said they were not sure what the substance was; some speculated that it might be anthrax, others that it could be heroin or cocaine.
"I'm not sure what it was, maybe drugs," said Sgt. First Class Chuck Nye, one of the soldiers who took part in the cave searches.
The soldiers said they also searched an abandoned village in the area called Shodiaka. They said the village appeared to have been recently abandoned, and they found some of the same white powder stored in clay jars there.