WASHINGTON/KABUL, 25 October — Refugees fleeing in ever greater numbers to an increasingly pressured Pakistan yesterday reported large-scale civilian casualties in the continuing US strikes as the United Nations confirmed that bombs had hit villages and a mosque and driven almost everyone from the three major cities. The United Nations independently confirmed that the US has been using cluster bombs, and Afghan tribal leaders meeting in Pakistan made plans for a new government in the post-Taleban period.
The refugees had harrowing tales to tell. Abdul Maroof, 28, was one of a group who reported that US jets had killed at least 20 civilians in a refugee convoy fleeing the southern Afghan town of Tirin Kot on Sunday.
“When the bombing started the people panicked and were running here and there for shelter,” he said. “After the bombing there was just dust because the walls and roofs of our mud houses had collapsed and many were trapped.”
After the initial bombing, 25 people decided to flee and climbed on to a trailer hitched to the back of a tractor, only for it to be hit in a second US strike, killing 20 people including at least four children.
The refugees attempted to seek help in the Taleban stronghold of Kandahar, but found it devastated by bombing, and instead joined the thousands fleeing toward the border at Chaman, where Pakistan has begun to allow in refugees.
“Kandahar was completely destroyed,” refugee Abdul Nabi said. “Everything has turned into piles of stones. Thousands more people are on their way here.”
Foreign aid workers have set up a screening camp to hold 4,000 people at Killi Faizo near Chaman, allowing the injured and most needy to cross from Afghanistan on their way to three more camps being set up further away.
Some 60,000 refugees have managed to get past border guards and into Pakistan since the Sept. 11 attacks sparked fears of US reprisals and aid workers fear that 1.5 million more could quit the drought-stricken land.
UN spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker said that more than 70 percent of the population of the main cities of Herat, Jalalabad and Kandahar had fled the 18-day-old US bombing campaign.
In Pakistan itself, to where the refugees are mostly fleeing, hundreds of Afghan religious and tribal leaders met with exiled politicians to discuss forming an interim government to replace the Taleban if it falls. They called for a UN peacekeeping force from Muslim countries to be deployed.
In another unrelated development, Pakistan authorities detained a former top government nuclear scientist over links between his relief agency and Afghanistan’s ruling Taleban regime. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood,
who was a project director in Pakistan’s nuclear program in the lead up to the nation’s nuclear tests in 1998, was picked up by authorities for questioning on Tuesday, spokesman Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi said.
In Karachi, Pakistani police fired tear gas at thousands of stone-throwing demonstrators in Karachi who took to the streets after 35 Pakistani militants were killed by US bombing in Kabul. A crowd of more than 5,000 people had gathered in Pakistan’s largest city for funeral prayers for the militants, who were among thousands of Pakistanis said to have joined a jihad, or holy war, against the United States. The rally degenerated into clashes with security forces. Authorities refused to let eight of the bodies cross back into Pakistan from Afghanistan. The Karachi rally only ended when it was revealed that the bodies had been smuggled across the border so they could be buried.
In Afghanistan, US warplanes carried out sustained raids on the regime’s miltia at key positions defending the capital Kabul and the northern town of Mazar-e-Sharif, where a rebel leader claimed his men had driven the Taleban back. Commander Muhammad Atta said his opposition forces in the Dara-e-Souf valley, 70 kilometers (43 miles) south of the northern town of Mazar-e-Sharif, had mounted an offensive toward the district of Keshendeh during the night.
He said that “wave after wave” of US air attacks on the enemy lines had enabled his men to win control of four villages in fighting which left between 70 and 80 Taleban troops dead and 150 captured. “The Americans bombed them again and again. It was very helpful for us,” Atta told AFP.
AFP reporters at the front north of Kabul saw five US jets bombing Taleban frontlines, dropping at least 13 bombs on positions on the Shomali plains. Opposition commanders there were less impressed, and again branded the bombing insufficient to help their outnumbered and underequipped fighters advance, as US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has urged them to do.
“They won’t win this war with bombs,” said Gulbad Shah, who leads opposition troops at Topdara, “They’d be better off giving us supplies, so we can attack the Taleban.”
The United Nations meanwhile confirmed that US cluster bombs had hit a mosque in a military camp, a military hospital and a nearby civilian village during attacks on the western Afghan city of Herat on Monday night.
Bunker said that independent reports indicated that civilians “were injured or killed” and that villagers had requested help from demining agencies to clear the deadly cluster bomblets scattered over the area.
The Taleban claimed that the military hospital was struck Sunday and that Monday night’s raid hit a civilian facility killing 100 people.
Some 1,000 Afghan tribal and religious leaders met in Pakistan with supporters of their exiled king to discuss an interim government to take over if the militia is ousted. Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani, the royalist head of the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan (NIFA), said 87-year-old King Muhammad Zahir Shah favored the deployment of UN peacekeepers from Muslim countries after the fighting.
Gailani said there should be a “broad-based” government and appealed to moderate Taleban supporters to help build the new administration that “should conform to Islam and Shariat (Islamic law) and should enjoy popular support”.
He also said that moderate Taleban leaders could join the administration if they abandoned the regime, an idea likely to be opposed by many Northern Alliance commanders and their Indian and Russian backers.
In the US, officials admitted they had been caught napping by a germ warfare attack on the heart of US government as two postal workers from Washington died and anthrax spores were found in the White House’s mail depot.
Since Sept. 11, three people have died of anthrax following an apparent attempt to spread the bacterium in germ-laden letters posted to US media organizations and government offices.
“For the first time in our history,” US Vice President Dick Cheney warned, “we will probably suffer more casualties here at home than our forces will overseas.”
Anthrax was detected Tuesday in a White House mail sorting center in a military depot outside Washington.
Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher said yesterday that his department had been wrong to underestimate the threat after coming under criticism for treating congressional staff with antibiotics but not postal workers.
“We were wrong. We were wrong,” he told ABC television, “The assumptions had been that people could not be exposed.”
US strikes have been led by warplanes based on carriers in the Indian Ocean but special forces have joined up with some opposition units on the ground and more than 100 crack troops took part in a raid on Kandahar last week.
US forces are also operating out of bases in central Asia and an Uzbek serviceman said that a base given to the Americans by his government on the Afghan border now houses 2,000 US troops from the elite 10th Mountain Division.
