newstime digest

A descending chronological look at selected headlines from The Morrock News Service

11/29/01

U.S. SUFFERS FIRST FATALITY SINCE AFGHAN WAR BEGAN

Among hundreds of bodies littered across an open yard at a prison fortress in Mazar-e-Sharif, northern Afghanistan, was that of a CIA officer, Johnny "Mike" Spann, who had become the first American killed in action inside the country since the U.S. war against the Taliban began.

Spann had been inside the compound, interrogating prisoners, when a riot broke out. Hundreds of prisoners and scores of northern alliance fighters were killed by alliance rebels and U.S. airstrikes before the uprising was halted. Details of Spann's death were sketchy.

A resident of Virginia, Spann, 32, leaves a wife and three children. A Marine Corps captain, he joined the CIA in 1999, his father said, because "Someone has got to do the things no one else wants to do."

Though Spann was the first American military fatality within Afganistan, four other U.S. military personnel have been killed in accidents outside the country, including two who died in a helicopter crash in Pakistan shortly after the campaign began.

The prison held 800 foreign Taliban volunteers who had been captured, and all 800 were said to have died in the attacks that quelled the riot. There were some reports that two American soldiers were killed by a misguided bomb during a U.S. air strike, but American military officials said there were no such fatalities, though five soldiers were wounded.

As for what happens next in Afghanistan, the Washington Post reports that the U.S.-backed northern alliance does not favor an international security force, and continues to disagree about the specifics of an interim government to run the country in the absence of the routed Taliban.

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