Battle of Tora Bora | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Part of the War in Afghanistan | |||||||
Location of Tora Bora in Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border. |
|||||||
|
|||||||
Belligerents | |||||||
United States United Kingdom Germany Northern Alliance |
Turkistan Islamic Party | ||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Tommy Franks Michael Boyce Reinhard Günzel Bismillah Khan Hazrat Ali Abdul Zahir Qadir Mohammed Zaman |
Osama bin Laden Mohammed Omar Abdul Ghani Baradar Mohammed Abdul Kabir Saif-ur-Rehman Mansoor Sufi Muhammad |
||||||
Strength | |||||||
~50 Members of U.S. 1st SFOD-D others from CIA SAD 5th Special Forces Group 160th SOAR Kommando Spezialkräfte Special Boat Service other coalition forces (aircraft) ~100–1,000 Northern Alliance fighters |
~300–1,000 | ||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
Coalition: None Northern Alliance: Unknown |
200 killed |
The Battle of Tora Bora was a military engagement that took place in Afghanistan from December 6, 2001 to December 17, 2001, during the opening stages of the War in Afghanistan launched by the United States following the September 11 attacks. The U.S. and its allies believed that Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda, was hiding in the mountains at Tora Bora.
US and allied forces overran Taliban and al-Qaeda positions and heard bin Laden's voice in intercepted radio transmissions several times, but they failed to kill or capture him. Bin Laden escaped to the Federated Tribal Areas of Pakistan, where he stayed for nearly a decade before being located and killed by Navy SEALs of the United States Navy Special Warfare Development Group in May 2011.
Tora Bora (Pashto: تورا بوراblack cave) is a cave complex situated in the White Mountains of eastern Afghanistan, near the Khyber Pass.