WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD, 18 October — US jets intensified attacks yesterday on Kabul and the Taleban stronghold of Kandahar, striking an oil depot in the capital and sending a huge plume of smoke into the cloudless sky. Taleban fighters and opposition forces were reportedly locked in a seesaw battle for the strategic northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

US-led forces pounded Taleban front-line positions for the first time yesterday in apparent preparation for ground attacks, as the bombing campaign came under the critical spotlight. The Afghan capital, and the main cities of Jalalabad and Kandahar were all subjected to sustained day and night raids.

It was later reported by the Iranian state radio that US infantry landed from helicopters yesterday near Kandahar. “Informed sources report that US helicopters from the Pakistani-Afghan border have entered Afghan territory and deployed troops around Kandahar”, a radio correspondent said.

“It’s the second part of the American operation on Afghan soil, which started this morning,” it added. The radio did not give an exact number of US troops to have disembarked or of helicopters used in the operation.

Iranian television later cited witnesses as saying there were “exchanges of fire between Taleban forces and American soldiers near Kandahar.” However, neither Washington nor London would comment on any of the information, and the reports could not be independently confirmed.

The raids, into their 11th day, appear to be intensifying ahead of a crucial weekend summit of Pacific Rim nations in Shanghai, expected to back the US-led war on terrorism. More than 2,000 US bombs and missiles have been fired on Afghanistan since the campaign began, Washington has said.

In Kandahar, where the onslaught was described as particularly ferocious, Taleban officials claimed 20 civilians had been killed, including an entire family who were wiped out as they tried to flee the southern city in a truck. The Taleban also claimed two clinics in the city, the militia’s main base, had been hit, a day after the United States admitted mistakenly bombing a Red Cross warehouse in Kabul.

Meanwhile, international humanitarian organizations appealed for a pause in the bombing campaign, so they could rush in food for millions of Afghans before the harsh winter sets in next month.

Throughout the day, warplanes pounded targets in the north of Kabul, including a fuel depot near the airport. A huge plume of black smoke rose in the clear sky as the thud of detonations rattled the city.

One bomb crashed through the roof of a boys’ school but did not explode, according to a UN spokesman in Islamabad, Hassan Fairdous. There were no injuries, and demolition teams from a UN-affiliated mine-clearing group rushed to the school to try to defuse the bomb, Fairdous said.

In Kandahar, US jets struck military targets throughout the city, Taleban officials reported. Residents said by telephone that Taleban fighters in Kandahar were handing out weapons to civilians.

The residents said about 150 men armed with rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles were guarding the Kandahar compound of the Taleban’s supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, which has been attacked repeatedly during the air campaign.

Taleban officials claimed 47 civilians had been killed in the Kandahar area in the past two days. They included seven civilians who died when US jets attacked two trucks they were using to flee the city, the Taleban said. Those reports could not be independently verified.

With attacks intensifying, Omar, the Taleban leader, radioed his field commanders yesterday to rally morale and assure them that God was on their side, according to the Afghan Islamic Press in Pakistan.

“God will defeat the great infidels,” Omar reportedly told his followers. “Everyone has to die one day. We are not afraid of dying and we should die as Muslims,” Omar said. “We have fought against the Russians and this is another jihad against infidels. It is a test. People are in pain but God will grant them success.”

In Islamabad, a Western diplomatic source said the Taleban’s foreign minister, Mullah Abdul Wakil Muttawakil, had traveled secretly to Pakistan last week to urge a pause in the air campaign so that so-called moderates within the Islamic militia could reassess their position on Osama Bin Laden, the main suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks. Pakistan denied the report, but the source said Muttawakil asked the Pakistanis to convey the request to the Americans. The source spoke on condition of anonymity.

Speaking in London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair indicated there would be no letup until the Taleban comply and hand over Bin Laden. “We have no option but to continue this, to bring it to a successful conclusion and to close down that terrorist network once and for all,” Blair said.

The Taleban are also battling a coalition of Afghan opposition forces who were themselves driven from power by the Islamic militia in 1996. In Washington, Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem said (Continued from Page One)

the two sides were locked in a “seesaw” battle for control of Mazar-e-Sharif, a key northern city. Control of Mazar-e-Sharif would enable the opposition to consolidate its supply lines in the strategic area along the borders with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, from which they obtain weapons.

With no sign of the fighting abating, aid organizations expressed growing concern for the fate of an estimated 2 million Afghans who may not survive the winter without food aid. “It is evident now that we cannot, in reasonable safety, get food to hungry Afghan people,” Barbara Stocking, director of Oxfam International, said in Islamabad. “Time’s almost out.”

The Washington-based World Food Program said Taleban militiamen seized two warehouses in Afghanistan that contained nearly 7,000 metric tons of donated wheat. The seizures Tuesday night left the World Food Program with about 5,000 tons of wheat in the country.

The Pentagon confirmed Tuesday that a US Navy pilot had bombed International Red Cross warehouses in Kabul, suspecting the depots were storing Taleban supplies.

In an effort to shore up the diplomatic drive, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told an Arabic language satellite television station Tuesday that the United States does not want to hurt ordinary Afghans and is not seeking to occupy any country. It was the second Bush administration interview in as many days with Al-Jazeera following Monday’s appearance by White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

In describing the military action, Rumsfeld said: “We feel that they’re progressing in an orderly way, in a measured way ... we’ve taken our time, and we have been very careful in selecting targets,” according to a transcript released by the Pentagon yesterday.

Amid the campaign, a spate of 33 cases of anthrax exposure in the US Senate shook the United States yesterday, with fears of germ warfare closing down large parts of Congress. President George W. Bush, on his way to a summit in Asia, said the fight could stretch on for two years.

Jangling American nerves already frayed by last month’s mass killing of civilians in New York and Washington, 25 members of Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle’s staff were found to have been exposed to anthrax, a potential bioterrorism weapon. US officials have said they have no evidence to link the anthrax attacks to Bin Laden. But Bush has said there could be a link.

The US bombing was so powerful that other NATO countries were being made to feel irrelevant, French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine said. Washington had politely spurned offers of assistance, he said.

“You could say the real problem arises for NATO, which offered its services and was told ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ I can understand why people at NATO are asking ‘what use are we,’” Vedrine said.

Warplanes yesterday dropped a half-dozen bombs at the base of a mountain once used by militant groups and now a graveyard. One bomb hit a truck packed with residents of Chunai town who were fleeing the attacks, said Abdul Hanan Himat, an official of the Taleban’s Information Ministry in Kabul.

“Another attack, we don’t know whether it was a bomb or a missile, killed all passengers,” he said of the incident, but gave no death toll. Relentless attacks on Kandahar have cut power in the city and sources close to the Taleban said leaders were in hiding or darting from place to place to evade the strikes.

Australia said yesterday it would add 1,550 military personnel, including elite Special Air Service troops, to the US and British military operations against the Taleban.

The Taleban have not given an overall death toll from the US-led strikes but a compilation of their reports showed the figure rising toward 400, about a third of them from a single village near eastern Jalalabad hit last week. US officials have rejected Taleban reports of large numbers of civilian deaths.

The bombings have already stirred unrest in the Islamic world and prompted criticism from leaders of moderate Muslim countries, such as Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Muhammad.

The UN special envoy in Afghanistan cautioned yesterday that the world community should not rush to establish a post-Taleban government, but it should let the Afghans decide for themselves the kind of government they want. “We will work in the first place with the Afghans, all the Afghans, and those who have an interest, concern and influence in the situation in Afghanistan,” Lakhdar Brahimi said.

Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister, has been charged by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan with finding solutions to restore peace and settle the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.