KABUL, Afghanistan - American 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 airstrike.

"We conducted an airstrike 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. O'Hara also declined to say if the airstrike was directly related to the missing military team.

He said earlier Saturday that there had been no sign of the team by rescuers who are desperately scouring the mountains near Asadabad town, Kunar province, close to the Pakistani border.

A purported Taliban spokesman claimed Friday that militants had captured one of the men.

Meanwhile in central Afghanistan, 18 rebels and two Afghan soldiers were killed in an assault on a Taliban hide-out in mountains where about 100 insurgents were thought to be camped, Uruzgan provincial Gov. Jan Mohammed Khan said.

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