U.S. special forces killed five suspected al Qaeda or Taliban militants and detained 32 others in a raid on a compound in southern Afghanistan, military officials said Monday. U.S. Marine Captain Steven O'Connor said the special forces team was shot at Sunday evening as it raided the compound suspected of being a sanctuary for senior al Qaeda or Taliban figures in Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar's hometown.

The compound was in Dehrawd, 30 miles north of the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

Dehrawd, or Dara Wat, in Uruzgan province, is a mud-house village where the fundamentalist Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Omar, grew up after being taken in by his uncle.

O'Connor could not say whether all of the detainees were from al Qaeda, or from the Taliban.

It was the first reported firefight between U.S. troops and Islamic fighters since March, when U.S. and Afghan forces took on several hundred in the Shah-i-kot valley of eastern Afghanistan.

Australian special forces two weeks ago killed four suspected al Qaeda fighters near the Pakistani border.

Military officials say al Qaeda and the Taliban have dispersed, melted into the population or slipped across the border to Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal areas, where ethnic Pashtun traditions find an echo in the Taliban's strict interpretation of Islam.

PHOTO CAPTION

American soldiers from the 101st Airborne leave a helicopter at Bagram air base, north of Kabul, after a mission to hunt down al Qaeda or Taliban fighters suspected of launching rockets at the eastern Afghan city of Khost, where some U.S.-led forces are based, May 13, 2002. The troops found evidence of launch sites but no enemy. Photo by Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters