WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD, 1 November — US forces unleashed their heaviest bombers in the first daylong bombardment of front-line Taleban positions yesterday while US officials scrambled to head off the danger of a renewed terrorist onslaught. Wave upon wave of warplanes, including at least one massive B-52 bomber, dropped salvoes of heavy bombs on the militia’s biggest concentration of shock troops on the front line north of Kabul, as Washington mulled sending in more ground troops.
Two villages in eastern Afghanistan were struck by US bombs, flattening 40 to 50 houses, Taleban officials said. The villages of Baloch and Barina were hit in an attack around 0930 GMT, a Taleban official in the eastern city of Jalalabad told AFP by telephone. “Ambulances have been sent to the scene but they have not yet come back, so we do not know how many people have been killed,” the official said.
The two villages are around 40 kilometers west of Jalalabad close to the village of Kadam, where villagers reported at least 160 deaths from a US attack on Oct. 11. An AFP reporter who visited the remote village saw dozens of collapsed houses, one unexploded bomb and 18 fresh graves, but the numbers given by the villagers could not be confirmed.
Taleban also accused the US of carrying out genocide in the war-battered country, saying US and British military had hit civilian targets including a clinic. “It is clear now that America is committing genocide in Afghanistan to achieve its political goals,” a defiant Taleban ambassador in Pakistan, Mulla Abdul Salam Zaeef, told reporters in the Pakistani capital.
“If America thinks it will subjugate the Afghan people by resorting to genocide of innocent people, they are wrong,” he declared. “America and their claim of being protectors of human rights is proving to be a futile and baseless claim,” said the ambassador recognized only by Pakistan. Zaeef drew a list of locations which he claimed were hit by American and British warplanes inside Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing civilians. “Numerous” people, were killed in a clinic in Kandahar that was targeted in yesterday’s bombing campaign, Zaeef charged.
But the United States’ tough stance on the battlefield was undermined by wobbles on the home front, where officials were baffled by the latest anthrax death and worried that radicals were preparing fresh assaults on US targets. Washington banned planes from flying near US nuclear power stations as a manhunt was launched for six “Middle Eastern” men seen with maps of a power plant and box-cutters like those used on Sept. 11 to hijack four jets.
Opposition Northern Alliance commanders watching the B-52s and attack jets pounding the Taleban front line on the Shomali plane 50 kilometers north of Kabul were delighted, and hailed the attacks as a breakthrough. AFP correspondents with Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan saw a US B-52 bomber conduct at least two bombing raids on Taleban front lines 50 kilometers north of Kabul. It was the first time a B-52 was seen in the region. “Today is a better day. If this keeps going the Taleban will be weakened and the front lines will collapse,” an enthusiastic commander, Alu Zaqi, said as he watched the attacks from his front-line post in Rabat.
“We have had information that the Taleban have been forced to change their positions frequently in the past four days. With this kind of raid their heavy weapons will be destroyed,” he added, showing a rare smile. The Northern Alliance has derided previous US attacks as ineffectual and unlikely to budge the 6,000 hardened Taleban fighters ranged against them north of the capital.
But this week the raids have been stepped up as US special forces increased their cooperation with the opposition on the ground and the rebels prepare a offensive against the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confirmed late Tuesday that US troops on the ground in Afghanistan were directing airstrikes and coordinating supply operations for the Afghan opposition.
Intelligence sources in northern Afghanistan estimated the number of US personnel in the country at around 40, while the Taleban have claimed that 500 US and allied forces are with the regime’s enemies. The strikes have also, however, brought misery to Afghan civilians, undermining support for the US campaign among its allies and triggering a huge exodus of angry, hungry refugees toward Pakistan.
The Taleban said that US planes were continuing to hit targets away from the front line in the militia’s Kandahar fiefdom, and took a group of foreign journalists to inspect the wreckage of the ruined city. Syed Abbas told AFP that US strikes killed 13 civilians, injured five doctors and destroyed a clinic operated by the Afghan Red Crescent.
Bombs had also flattened the homes of Taleban supreme leader Mulla Muhammad Omar and his ally Osama Bin Laden as well as the “House of Vice and Virtue”, from where the regime’s strict moral code is enforced. Suhail Shaheen, the deputy Taleban ambassador to Islamabad, told reporters in Islamabad that “1,500 innocent men, women and children” had been killed by the US strikes. Washington has hotly denied previous Taleban civilian casualty figures.
As the refugee situation remained critical, the office in Islamabad of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said conditions were deteriorating at the Spin Boldak camp, set up by the Taleban near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Pakistan yesterday closed the border crossing by the camp after allowing 4,000 of the neediest refugees over to a temporary camp nearby at Killi Faizo near Chaman in central Pakistan.
Federal agents were scrambling to track done the six men — described as Middle Eastern in appearance and carrying Israeli passports — who were stopped at the weekend but released when their passports were found to be in order. US aviation authorities have slapped no-fly zones around 86 sensitive installations, including nuclear plants.
As support for the strikes began to waver amid growing reports of civilian casualties, rumors are growing that US ground troops may be sent into Afghanistan to secure a base, support the opposition and lead the manhunt. Rumsfeld will travel to Moscow tomorrow for talks with his opposite number Sergei Ivanov then visit countries in central Asia, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said. US forces are already operating out of bases in Uzbekistan and, reportedly, Tajikistan, in their campaign, as Russian as well as local support would be necessary for any intensification of the ground war. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said yesterday after meeting with US President George W. Bush, that more troops might be sent to join those already in the theater of operations.
Meanwhile, Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were “furious” to learn that six men carrying box cutters — like the ones thought used to hijack the Sept. 11 planes — and maps of a nuclear power plant in Florida and the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline, had been detained and released by immigration officials, a senior law enforcement official told AFP.
In Washington, the Federal Aviation Administration slapped restrictions on airspace around 86 sensitive US nuclear sites until Nov. 6 and increased security in New York. Officials said they had no precise information on what the targets could be, but Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge said Tuesday that US energy companies in particular should be on high alert this week. “You can fairly assume that the experts view this information as somehow related to Al-Qaeda or Bin Laden, or else we wouldn’t have ramped it up,” Ridge said. Bush said he was aware the warning could alarm Americans but urged them not to be cowed by terrorists into surrendering their freedoms. “The country must stay on the alert... Our enemies still hate us. Our enemies have no values that regard life as precious. They are active,” he said.
The Taleban ambassador in Islamabad blamed the cluster bombs were made in the form of “food boxes,” American planes have been dropping as food relief for Afghans. Zaeef alleged that bridges and electricity stations were being targeted in the air raids. “They destroyed bridges used by the public in Kandahar. Barikab bridge in north of Kabul has also been destroyed,” he said.
Khairkhana district in Kabul was also “heavily bombed” yesterday, he said. “Kandahar citizens are facing shortage of water and electricity after these facilities were hit by America,” Zaeef said. He pointed out that Pentagon was targeting civilians to “coerce people to rise against the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”
A senior opposition representative said that opposition Defense Minister Gen. Muhammad Fahim had met a senior US military official in the neighboring state of Tajikistan during the last two days to discuss the plans. Ahmad Ziah Masood, a member of the opposition’s senior council, said that he did not expect US ground troops to join the opposition in Afghanistan. He said there were 8,000-10,000 fighters ready to move on the ruling Taleban near Kabul and a further 6,000 engaging the enemy near the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.
Meanwhile, tow more British Muslims have died in Afghanistan, according to reports in the press in Britain yesterday, although there is confusion over whether they were in the country to fight on the side of the Taleban. The British government said it would consider charges of treason against Britons who took up arms against the country, apparently hardening its earlier position. “If you take up arms against your own country, your own state, whether in that state or abroad against that state’s agents, that’s an offense under the 1351 Act,” Home Office minister Lord Rooker told the House of Lords late on Tuesday. A Home Office spokesman had said earlier: “Treason is probably not the most appropriate charge.”
A spokesman for the Al-Muhajiroun organization said from Pakistan that two more unnamed British Muslims had died, one from Bradford and the other from Blackburn. The spokesman, Hassan Butt, did not name the men. Butt, a young British Muslim, has been pictured on British television recruiting for the Taleban in Pakistan.
