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Ryan Chilcote: Troops hoped to find al Qaeda

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (CNN) -- The U.S. military wrapped up its first large-scale operation in Afghanistan in over a month Saturday, as hundreds of troops located, searched and destroyed caves once used by al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

CNN producer Ryan Chilcote, the only television journalist to accompany U.S. forces on the mission, talked with anchor Kyra Phillips about the operation Saturday.

CHILCOTE: Operation Mountain Lion lasted for six days. It involved approximately 500 soldiers from the United States' 101st Airborne Division. That mission came to a close today when the last troops in the Zawar Kili region of eastern Afghanistan -- that's just next to Pakistan -- returned to the Bagram Air Base just outside of Kabul.

The airborne [division] actually began airlifting those troops out on Thursday but had to wait a couple of days because of bad weather to pick up the rest.

The goal of that mission was to search and destroy caves that have been occupied ... by al Qaeda and Taliban forces. And we had some exclusive access on that trip, and I actually filmed those troops searching those caves.

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PHILLIPS: Tell me what the soldiers found while going through the caves.

CHILCOTE: They found a mixture of things. But quite frankly, they don't really know what they found themselves, because there weren't any Arabic speakers -- or Arabic readers, I should say, on hand.

They certainly found prayer books, and then they found a lot of curious material, some manuals that said things like "Anti-aircraft" -- misspelled, I would note -- and then it would be translated into Arabic. It looked as if it was some kind of military manual that had been translated into Arabic.

They also found a USA Today from May 17, 2001. So they found lots of interesting things, and a lot of it had to do with military affairs. But it's up to the experts to say exactly what they collected.

PHILLIPS: Obviously, they have to translate these documents and sift through the things that they found. But does anything lead to Osama bin Laden?

CHILCOTE: No leads. The soldiers that I was with from the 101st were actually hoping to make contact with at least some small pocket of al Qaeda and Taliban forces, and that did not happen.

The U.S. troops there, some of them say they are acting on some intelligence reports -- they don't know whether they're correct or not -- that the al Qaeda and Taliban forces that were in that region may have slipped over the border into Pakistan.

So what they were actually doing is looking at these caves in eastern Afghanistan to see if the Taliban and al Qaeda forces had left any munitions behind. If they do indeed slip back from Pakistan, where they may be, into Afghanistan, they could pick up those munitions and then fight again.