U.S., forces bomb rebels compound in Afghanistan

U.S. warplanes bombed a suspected Taliban compound in an area where an elite U.S. military team has been missing for five days in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, a U.S. military spokesman said Saturday.

It was not clear if there were any casualties from the air strike.

"We conducted an air strike on a target we deemed we had to hit immediately. The target was an enemy compound in Kunar province," U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Jerry O'Hara said. "The bombing was done using precision guided munitions. The target objective was intelligence driven."

He said a "battle damage assessment is ongoing" and declined to speculate on casualties from the attack, which happened at dusk on Friday. The spokesman also declined to say if the airstrike was directly related to the missing military team.

Earlier on Saturday O'Hara said that there had been no sign of the missing team by rescuers who are still searching in the mountains near Asadabad town, in the Kunar province, close to the Pakistani border.

An alleged Taliban spokesman said Friday that rebels had captured one of the men.

Meanwhile in central Afghanistan, some 31 people, most of them rebels were killed during an assault on a Taliban location in the mountains where about 100 rebels were thought to be camped, Uruzgan provincial Gov. Jan Mohammed Khan said.

The latest casualties in Uruzgan province increased the death toll in the restive region to 47 within a week.

According to Mohammad Khan 25 rebels and six policemen were killed as more than 100 policemen swarmed through Tagab village and clashed with the rebels on Friday.

Four policemen and five suspected Taliban rebels were killed in a Taliban attack on a police checkpost in the early hours of Friday morning and another 20 militants and two policemen were killed in clashes later that day, he added.

The operation comes after fighting in the region left 25 people dead, including nine tribal elders who it is claimed rebels kidnapped and then killed, apparently in retaliation for the deaths of their own.

The loss of the American military team in remote eastern mountains worsened the already stinging blow suffered by the U.S. military after 16 troops were killed Tuesday aboard the MH-47 Chinook chopper.

It comes as the United States is scrambling to deal with the continuing rebellion.

U.S. forces were using "every available asset" to search for the missing men, O'Hara said. The troops are a small team from the special operations forces.

The downed helicopter had been trying to "extract the soldiers" Tuesday when it went into the mountains.

"All our hopes are that we find our missing service members. On top of those hopes are actions on the ground looking for them," O'Hara said. "It's a very demanding area: Very mountainous, very wooded and the likelihood of enemy contact is probable."

The loss of the helicopter, the missing men and the fierce clashes in central Afghanistan follow three months of unprecedented fighting that has killed about 495 suspected rebels, 49 Afghan police and soldiers, 134 civilians, and 45 U.S. troops.