KABUL/WASHINGTON, 19 October — US planes rained more death and destruction from the skies above Afghanistan yesterday with a Taleban spokesman putting the civilian death toll in Wednesday and yesterday’s strike at 70. A Taleban minister, however, said Osama Bin Laden and Taleban top leaders were all alive and well.
Throughout the day, fighter jets bombed the capital, Kabul, and other cities, killing dozens across the country according to witnesses and Taleban officials, despite appeals from aid agencies for a break to get badly needed food into the country.
A senior Taleban spokesman Abdul Hai Mutmaen said in remarks broadcast by Qatar’s Al-Jazeera television yesterday that between 600 and 900 people had so far been killed or were missing in the US-led strikes on Afghanistan.
"The number of casualties ranges between 600 and 900 dead because we consider those who are missing under the rubble among the dead," Mutmaen said.
"And don’t ask me about the number of wounded, because it is in the thousands and I don’t have a figure for that," he added.
Sources in Washington said members of Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network were killed by US military operations in Afghanistan, but there is no evidence Bin Laden or his top lieutenants were among them.
The head of an Islamic information agency said in Cairo yesterday that an Egyptian presumed close to Bin Laden was killed while handling a bomb dropped by US aircraft on Afghanistan. The Egyptian, named as Abu Bassir Al-Masri, an alias, was killed last Friday near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, Yasser al-Serri, head of the Islamic Information Observatory, told AFP from London.
Residents in Kabul reported four loud explosions within the city limits. "Two explosions were very close," an AFP reporter in the city said, adding that the bombs were dropped by low-flying aircraft and landed within the city limits.
"The explosions were very loud, it gave the impression as if Kabul has been rocked by an earthquake," he said.
Two other explosions were heard further away in the southeastern part of the city, he said.
The US targets were in Kabul, around the ruling Taleban’s southern stronghold of Kandahar, which was rocked by a series of powerful explosions, and the eastern city of Jalalabad — hub of Afghanistan’s notorious guerrilla training camps, witnesses told Reuters.
Seven passers-by were killed when a bomb hit an ammunition dump in Kabul, witnesses and officials said.
Terrified residents raced for cover as two bombs hit a Taleban building and another struck an ammunition storage area north of Kabul, setting off rounds of ammunition that exploded into the streets like deadly fireworks, witnesses said.
At least 13 civilians were killed when bombs dropped by US jets hit residential areas in the cities of Kabul and Kandahar.
In Kabul, one person was killed when three bombs fell in Mikroryan residential complex.
Only one of an 8-member family survived when their house in Qala Zaman Khan locality, five kilometers east of the city, was similarly hit.
A Reuters reporter watched as city resident Nazirullah mourned over the bodies of his family, killed at around midday at their home in Qala Zaman Khan. A Taleban military base lies a few hundred yards away.
"It was around 12 o’clock when the bomb hit here. My wife, sister, brother, sister-in-law and mother died in it. I don’t know about my neighbors," he said.
A woman passing by was killed by a second bomb that created a huge crater in the street in front of what remained of Nazirullah’s home.
Witnesses in Kandahar told AIP that five civilians were killed and 12 wounded when the US resumed attacks on areas surrounding the city and the airport early yesterday.
Meanwhile, a fire at the Army Corps center near Kandahar, set off by earlier air raids, had been put out, according to witnesses.
AIP said the US also bombed military installations and the 81st Brigade headquarters near the eastern city of Jalalabad yesterday.
The US is for the first time flying armed, unmanned drones into combat with the missile-packing "Predator" spy planes taking to the skies over Afghanistan, said US defense officials.
The remote-controlled RQ-1 aircraft have been modified by the US Air Force to carry two Hellfire anti-tank missiles which have been fired several times in the intense 12-day air campaign, the officials told Reuters.
Taleban’s ambassador to Pakistan said more than 400 people had been killed so far in the US-led strikes, and confirmed that the country was running short of food and medicines.
"Under the cover of fighting terrorism, America is committing state terrorism," Ambassador Salam Zaeef said in a statement from a location between Helmand and Herat in western Afghanistan and issued by his embassy in Islamabad.
Food and medicine were running short, he said, and urged aid agencies to send in emergency relief.
"Precious lives were lost every day because of the shortage," the statement said.
Taleban leaders rebuffed rumors that Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil had left the country or that rifts had opened up in the Taleban, saying he was still in Kandahar and promised to find some way for reporters to talk to him.
"There is no rift. He is doing his normal work, but due to the failure of communication links with Kandahar, he has not been able to give statements so far," he said.
President George W. Bush said the attacks were "paving the way for friendly troops on the ground."
White House officials said the president’s comments were not meant to indicate the impending use of US troops on the ground but greater involvement of the opposition Northern Alliance in military action against the ruling Taleban.
Pentagon officials said in Washington: "We are making Taleban more vulnerable as air defenses weaken. Troops are made to run out of damaged barracks and bunkers into the open where they are easier to spot," one of the officials told Reuters.
The defense officials, who asked not to be identified, said land-based F-15E jets based in the Gulf were used for the first time in the campaign on Wednesday, striking Taleban troops and armor protecting the key northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.
In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said yesterday the United States and Britain were considering taking further targeted military action against the Taleban regime and Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network. "There will be further action that we are considering taking that will be again targeted," Blair told an audience of Arab journalists at Downing Street.
Defense experts here said a similar statement made by the prime minister Wednesday indicated the imminent use of ground forces in Afghanistan.
Taleban leaders dismissed reports that the opposition were making advances toward the strategic northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, where the United States says Taleban military bases have come under fierce attack.
