WASHINGTON, Dec 10: Fighting at caves in eastern Afghanistan has been intense and difficult with hard core Al-Qaeda fighters putting up stiff resistance to air and ground assaults on their mountain lairs, the Pentagon said on Monday.

“It’s tough,” said Victoria Clarke, the chief Pentagon spokesperson.

She said the 157 sorties flown by US warplanes over Afghanistan on Sunday focused on the caves and hideouts in eastern Afghanistan and those in the mountains north of Kandahar.

Afghan opposition forces on the ground last week launched an assault on the networks of caves in the Tora Bora area south of Jalalabad, but were reported to have made little progress in the face of fierce resistance.

“You get to where the remaining people who continue to fight and continue to resist are pretty hard core,” she said.

“So it’s pretty intense fighting and pretty intense activity. But we don’t have any information that would allow us to assess the situation and say this is close to the end or anything like that,” she said.

The quarry — Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar — continued to elude US forces even though all major Afghan cities have fallen to anti-Taliban forces, leaving only pockets of resistance around the country.

Clarke said the United States had no evidence that Osama bin Laden had slipped out of the country, but she said his and Omar’s whereabouts were not known.

Omar, who vanished after surrendering Kandahar, appears to be moving about the southern province with a small number of followers, she said.

“There is reason to believe that Omar may be somewhere broadly in the Kandahar region — in the city maybe not, maybe in one of those villages,” she said. “But he seems to be moving and he seems to be traveling with a very, very small number of people.”—AFP