WASHINGTON/KABUL, 12 October — US-led forces waged the heaviest round yet of their onslaught on Afghanistan yesterday, raining cluster bombs on Taleban targets in what Kabul residents called a terrible inferno of destruction as President George W. Bush said he ordered the land forces to launch a final attack to destroy Taleban and Al-Qaeda led by Bin Laden.
Bush made the announcement at a memorial service for the victims of the Sept.11 attacks attended by some 20, 000 people.
The United States also said it could take military action against countries like Syria later in its campaign against terrorism if they do not comply with the demands of Washington and its allies.
In Kabul, Taleban officials said more than 200 people were killed in the last 24 hours of the raids as Britain defense minister said military operations in Afghanistan could go on until next summer.
Defense Minister Geoff Hoon and armed forces top brass said the five-day military offensive against terrorist camps and the ruling Taleban had made good progress, but warned it could go on for many months.
Taleban officials said 50 bodies had been pulled from the rubble of one village in the east.
US defense officials said heavy B-52 and B-1 bombers targeted Taleban troops overnight Wednesday and into yesterday, using among other weapons cluster bombs that open as they fall to release dozens of high-explosive bomblets.
“We dropped a lot of bombs,” one of the officials said while Hoon added that the coalition’s campaign had rattled the Taleban, prompting defections among the ranks of followers of Mulla Muhammad Omar.
He said there have been “reports of both individual defections and of group defections”.
Sher Sha Hamdard, an official with the Taleban’s Bakhter news agency in the eastern city of Jalalabad, said the death toll from the overnight attack on the village had risen to 200 from the earlier estimate of 100. The village hit was called Kadam and lies about 40 kilometers west of Jalalabad.
Taleban Ambassador in Islamabad Abdul Salam Zaeef said: “The people of Afghanistan, who have been severely affected by 20 years of war, drought, sanctions and poverty, are now facing American air raids.” Zaeef said the real war will start in Afghanistan after the United States troops land in the country.
“We will fight any aggressor who enters our country,” Zaeef told reporters. “It is a shame for the (anti-terrorism) coalition to hit poor Afghan people,” he said.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he could not confirm or deny civilian casualties, but insisted: “We target only military facilities and targets. We take great care to avoid civilian casualties.”
During the attacks, a bomb apparently aimed at the airport hit a nearby village.
The Taleban’s education minister, Amir Khan Mutaqqi, said 10 members of the same family were killed in a attack when a stray US missile struck their home near the government’s customs house, about four kilometers east of Kabul.
Mutaqqi also said a mosque in Jalalabad had been destroyed with the death of 15 people but added that Taleban supreme leader Mulla Muhammad Omar and Bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding in the mountains, were both safe.
Mutaqqi said Taleban had deployed 10,000 troops close to the border with Uzbekistan, the central Asian state where US troops have begun to establish a presence. Mutaqqi said the troops had been sent to the frontier “for the defense of the country.” The New York Times citing Bush administration officials who declined to be named, said United States was getting “good cooperation” from Saudi Arabia in freezing assets linked to terrorists.
US President George W. Bush “is very satisfied with their cooperation on all aspects of the war against terrorism,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters.
In another development 1,200 Taleban soldiers defected to the Northern Alliances under the commander of 40 commanders. A key ally of the coalition Pakistan said yesterday US military personnel had arrived in the country but stressed it was committed to providing only logistical support for the US-led strikes. Asked if US military personnel were already on the ground, government spokesman Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi told Reuters: “I don’t think they’re combat troops.”
“Pakistan has implemented its support and cooperation in providing logistical support, we’re not going to go into details,” said Qureshi, top spokesman for Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
Pakistani media reports have said US Marines, aircraft, helicopters and other military personnel had arrived at Jacobabad in southern Sindh province and the remote coastal town of Pasni, on the Arabian Sea in arid Balochistan province.
“Army and paramilitary rangers have cordoned off the airport and no civilians are allowed to go near the airport...they stop everyone four km before the airport,” said a Jacobabad resident. Others said military hardware was being moved and Westerners had been seen.
“I assumed they are American...they move very occasionally and with tight security from the Pakistan Army,” one said.
Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider said Islamabad was allowing US forces to use two airports in its campaign to hunt down Bin Laden, but only for rescue and recovery missions. “I think, by and large, the US government has met our concerns and concerns of the people of Pakistan,” he said in an interview with BBC television.
On the civil war front, Afghan opposition forces said they had seized control of the central province of Ghor after a four-hour battle with the Taleban.
“We have taken Ghor completely and people are very happy that we have freed them,” opposition spokesman Muhammad Ashraf Nadeem told AFP by satellite phone from northern Afghanistan.
He said the forces of the opposition Northern Alliance, under commander Fazul Karim Aimaq, clinched control of the provincial capital Chaghcharan, which lies on a road network linking some of the western provinces.
Ghor’s capture will be an important morale boost for the opposition forces, who had only controlled about 10 percent of the country. They said they were aided by civilians rising up against the Taleban regime.
Ousted Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani rejected yesterday the idea of negotiations with the Taleban and called upon the ruling militia to capitulate.
The Taleban were guilty of crimes against the Afghan people, Rabbani said in the Tajik capital Dushanbe.
“They should lay down their weapons as soon as possible to ensure the least possible bloodshed,” he said.
“They should give themselves up to the international community because the time for negotiations has passed.”
Rabbani said his exiled government would only hold talks with allies of the Taleban “who do not have bloodstained hands”, referring to groups who switched sides in the Afghan civil war and now fight with the Northern Alliance forces.
US officials said they had unleashed the fearsome 5,000-pound “bunker bombs” to pound hidden command centers and flush out commanders loyal to Osama Bin Laden.
The Washington Post quoted one US intelligence official as saying the United States administration may be certain who was behind the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, and even where to look, but locating “prime suspect” Bin Laden in war-torn Afghanistan is proving no easy task.
“It’s like chasing one particular rabbit in the entire state of West Virginia,” the Washington Post quoted one US intelligence official as saying.
Bin Laden continues to switch locations on a regular basis, occasionally using an ambulance as camouflage, the paper cited other experts as saying.
Bin Laden is invariably protected by the ruling Taleban as he moves around mountainous Afghanistan, the report said.
The head of the Al-Qaeda international network has bankrolled the hard-line regime to the tune of $100 million since arriving in the country from Sudan in 1996, sources told the Post.
Meanwhile Arab countries piled on pressure for a lasting solution to the Israel-Palestinian crisis stressing that US efforts to stem international terrorism must be backed by a diplomatic offensive to cool the regional hotspot.
In Cairo, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak warned there would be “no safety on our planet” without a comprehensive solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, warning the problem would spawn more terrorists.
“We are dealing with the terrorists there in Afghanistan, but without reaching a comprehensive settlement to the problem of the Middle East, I’m afraid this will lead to very bad future on the whole world.
“There will be no safety on our planet in the future,” Mubarak said, speaking in English at a joint press conference with visiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
“This problem, I’m afraid that it may lead to much more generation of terrorist groups in the world,” he reiterated.
Jordan’s King Abdallah, visiting German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Berlin, said yesterday that rapid action was needed to put the peace process back on track as it was the only way to ensure stability in the region.
Schroeder also said the peace process, in tatters after more than a year of conflict, “needs new momentum”.
