WASHINGTON/KABUL, 10 October — The United States is encouraging the Afghan opposition including the Northern Alliance to combat the Taleban as Jalalabad, Kabul, Kandahar and Herat came under heavy bombardment throughout the day and last night. Attacks were also reported from Mazar-e-Sharif, Shiberghan and Kunduz in the north. Explosions and anti-aircraft fire lit up the skies over Kabul and other cities last night.
US authorities, meanwhile, indicated the Bush Administration might unleash ground attacks when the second phase begins tentatively after one week.
American planes yesterday hit targets other than airports in all the cities, according to Afghan Islamic Press.
Earlier in the day US forces struck at the heart of Taleban rule bombarding the home of the militia’s supreme leader.
“Strikes continue,” a Pentagon official said, as nightfall in Afghanistan was marked with renewed anti-aircraft fire in the southern Taleban stronghold Kandahar and the eastern city of Jalalabad, and a powercut in Kabul.
Overnight Monday, a US missile strike killed four Afghans working for a United Nations mine disposal team in Kabul and yesterday relief agencies said safety fears had forced them to suspend aid convoys into Afghanistan.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the deaths of four aid workers in US airstrikes was a hard blow for the United Nations.
But despite the apparent targeting error, Pentagon officials said the raids appeared to be doing their job, striking the residential compound of the Taleban’s supreme leader, Mulla Muhammad Omar.
Taleban ambassador in Islamabad, Abdul Salam Zaeef, said Mullah Omar escaped unhurt.
The Pentagon said the compound had been a “legitimate target” housing command and control facilities of the sort which an Afghan opposition spokesman said had been all but crippled by the threeday bombardment.
But another key target of the campaign, the head of the Al Qaeda network of Osama Bin Laden, was reported to have survived the blitz.
“He is alive,” Zaeef told CNN, “He is not in a location that is known to the people. He is in the mountains for his security.”
Abdul Hai Mutmaen, spokesman for Mulla Muhammad Omar, told AFP that 35 civilians were killed or injured during the latest round of US airstrikes and condemned the attacks as acts of “open terrorism.”
“The Taleban have lost their military capacity to a large extent,” Abdullah Abdullah of the Northern Alliance told CNN. “Their air power has been destroyed, most of their headquarters destroyed and their control system severely disturbed.”
He said a group of commanders from the ruling Taleban militia have switched sides and closed the only road linking north and south Afghanistan. “About 40 commanders with 1,200 men under arms joined the alliance and closed the Bagram-Bamiyan road to the Taleban on Monday night.
Speaking via satellite phone some 80 kilometers from Herat another opposition spokesman Ismail Khan said opposition forces were engaging the Taleban in Ghor province to the east, but denied that he was cooperating with US and British forces.
“Our attacks are not coordinated with the Americans. We have our own operations. They have theirs,” he said.
“Those who want America to save them don’t believe in their nation. We have to save ourselves.”
Khan said his forces, part of the loose opposition alliance which holds small pockets of territory around the northern half of the country, were also preparing to attack the Taleban in western Badghis province.
In a telephone conversation with Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted the ongoing military campaign against Afghanistan’s Taleban regime was not targeting Islam or Muslims anywhere in the world, including the Muslim population of the war-torn country.
“We don’t accept mixing Islam with terrorist acts,” Blair stated.
Prince Abdullah also reiterated Saudi Arabia’s rejection of terrorism. However, the Saudi crown prince pointed out that the international community’s antipathy toward Israeli excesses against Palestinians civilians was the main reason for growing violence and instability in various parts of the world. Blair promised that London would double its efforts to push forward the Middle East peace process.
Talking to BBC World Service separately, the British premier said that the West had made a mistake in “walking away” from Afghanistan after the Russians left over a decade ago and vowed that the error would not be repeated.
But Blair ruled out imposing a regime on the country if its ruling Taleban collapsed after military action by the US-led coalition.
He said: “What we may be able to do is facilitate the expression of the will of the people of Afghanistan about their own future.”
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned in washington yesterday the United States could start conducting “round-the-clock” strikes against Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld indicated the air campaign was entering a new phase — one in which US tactical aircraft are beginning to go after “targets of opportunity” that emerge from intelligence on the ground or other US assets. “That means that you have to wait until they emerge now,” he said. “That’s the way it is.”
He said there were some signs that members of Al-Qaeda and Taleban were trying to flee the country, but said they were difficult to verify.
“But it’s pretty clear that the Taleban and the Al-Qaeda are feeling some pressure,” he said.“We are now able to carry out strikes more or less around-the-clock as we wish,” Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon press conference.
He said the forces that Washington was encouraging included the main opposition Northern Alliance, tribes in the south of the country and elements within Taleban that oppose Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network.
But Rumsfeld stressed that the aim of the US-led military operation was to wipe out terrorism in the area and not to install a new government in Afghanistan because of its concern at guarding against terror.
Washington Post quoting defense officials reported yesterday that when the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan starts to wind down at the end of this week, the Defense Department plans to begin the next phase of the war on terrorism by sending a “significant number” of additional ground troops to the Middle East and Central Asia.
The deployment of the additional forces is not a prelude to a full-scale conventional ground attack on Afghanistan, they said, but the next step in what is essentially an ad hoc approach to an unconventional war.
Their presence will give planners maximum flexibility as they consider options in the days ahead, a senior defense official told the Washington Post.
“They (the troops) will start to go, but it’s not because we have a clear and defined plan,” the official said. “We want to position ourself in such a fashion that we have a wide range of options.”
Asked whether the Pentagon is considering large-scale ground attacks inside Afghanistan, one official said, “Nothing has been ruled out.”
In Belgium, Gen. Joseph Ralston, supreme commander of allied forces in Europe, said NATO can provide more of its AWACS radar aircraft to the United States if it asks for them.
In another development, Taleban arrested a French reporter on charges of spying. Michel Peyrard, 44, disguised in Muslim Women’s dress works for weekly Paris Match. He had a satellite telephone, tape recorder and “other spying instruments” when he was arrested near the city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan.
“His mission was totally a spying mission and no leniency will be shown to him,” the Pakistan-based AIP quoted a Taleban spokesman in Jalalabad as saying. “The Frenchman will be tried by a special court.”
