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(03/05/02 7:01am)
SURMAD, Afghanistan -- U.S. warplanes pounded al Qaeda and Taliban mountain strongholds in eastern Afghanistan on Monday while hundreds of coalition ground troops scoured the rugged, snow-covered terrain for pockets of enemy fighters. The heavily armed defenders responded with bursts of mortars, grenades and machine gun fire.\nSeven Americans died Monday when two helicopters took enemy fire in the offensive -- code-named Operation Anaconda. The attack marked the first time U.S. conventional ground troops have been used in an offensive operation.\nThe code name Anaconda apparently was chosen because the giant South American snake of that name crushes its victims encircled in the muscular coils of its body. The operation was said to be designed to cut off all means of escape for al Qaeda and Taliban holed up in the region.\nThe offensive, which includes about 2,000 Afghans, Americans and special operations forces from six allied nations, is the largest U.S.-led ground operation of the five-month Afghan war.\nWave after wave of B-52s and other aircraft unleashed bombs for a fourth day to try to soften enemy positions in the snowcapped peaks.\n"In one minute, I counted 15 bombs," Rehmahe Shah, a security guard at the intelligence unit in the provincial capital Gardez, said Monday.\nIn the eastern Afghan town of Khost near the border, troops at the American-controlled air base called in air support early Monday after the base came under small arms fire, said Maj. Brad Lowell, another spokesman at the U.S. Central Command.\nNo one was injured and the firing stopped, he said.\nIn Tampa, Fla., Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said units of the 10th Mountain Division and the 101st Airborne Division had been inserted into the battle area.\nFranks refused to say how many al Qaeda and Taliban were holed up in the extensive labyrinth of caves and ravines at the base of the mountains.\nThe commander described the ground operation as a series of short, often intense clashes with small numbers of fugitives fought in bitter cold at elevations of 8,000 to 12,000 feet.\n"We might find five enemy soldiers in one place and then perhaps some distance away from there we may find three and then some distance we may find 15 or 20," Franks said. He described the battle area as "a very, very tough operating environment for our soldiers to be in."\nHowever, Roseuddin, an Afghan civilian who was in the village of Shah-e-Kot shortly before the attacks began, estimated the al Qaeda and Taliban force at about 600, commanded by a former Taliban officer, Saif Rahman.\nRoseuddin said the fighters had been storing provisions for months in anticipation of a bloody siege.\n"They told people: 'If you want to leave or stay it is up to you,'" Roseuddin said. "'But we're staying in those caves because they were ours in the holy war against Russia,'" he quoted the fighters as saying in reference to the war against the Soviets in the 1980s.\nAbout 40 U.S. troops, including 11 injured Monday, have been wounded since the operation began Friday night in the snow-covered mountains southwest of Gardez.\nDefense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said half of the wounded were already back in the fight and the others were evacuated from the region.\nNeither the former Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar nor al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was believed to be in the area.\nAfghan and Western officials estimate there are up to 5,000 al Qaeda fighters remaining in Afghanistan.
(12/07/01 5:09am)
KABUL, Afghanistan -- The Taliban agreed Thursday to surrender Kandahar, their last bastion and birthplace, if their warriors were not punished and safety was guaranteed to leader Mullah Mohammed Omar who once vowed to fight to the death. America said it would not accept any deal allowing the cleric to go free. \nThe promise to give up the city and begin handing over weapons as early as Friday marked the final collapse of the militant movement that imposed strict Islamic rule on Afghanistan for five years. \nPersonal rivalries among anti-Taliban leaders and the fate of Omar still could wreck the fragile agreement. The head of the new Afghan transition government, Hamid Karzai, refused to say whether Omar would be arrested as Washington has demanded. \nDefense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the United States would not stand for any agreement that lets the Taliban leader go free and "live in dignity." \nPakistani intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said radio intercepts had picked up no communications by Omar in three days and that he appeared to have lost contact with senior Taliban commanders. \n"It seems that the final collapse of the Taliban is now upon us," said British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush's closest ally in the war. "That is a total vindication of the strategy that we have worked out from the beginning." \nThe former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan seemed to agree. When asked about the future of the movement, Salam Zaeef said: "I think we should go home." \nThe murky surrender pact made no mention of Osama bin Laden, accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and left unclear the fate of hundreds of Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens and other foreign fighters of his al Qaeda terrorist network. \nAfter briefing members of the Senate on the situation in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld was asked whether the United States would insist on U.S. justice or would agree to let an international tribunal deal with Omar. \n"We would prefer to have Omar," Rumsfeld replied. He said "There's still a good deal of confusion" surrounding the surrender. \nBut Karzai said the United States had not been consulted. \n"This is an Afghan question," he told the BBC. \nIn eastern Afghanistan, meanwhile, B-52s hammered suspected mountain hide-outs of bin Laden and his fighters. About 1,500 anti-Taliban forces have been attacking the region around the Tora Bora compound for two days. \nIn Washington, U.S. officials said al Qaeda fighters are believed operating from five to 10 cave complexes at Tora Bora in the White Mountains south of Jalalabad. Officials suspect bin Laden is in that area but also are on alert for his presence in the south around Kandahar. \nSouthwest of that city, U.S. Marines went on alert and fired mortars and flares into the desert from their base after detecting what a spokesman said "appears to be a credible threat." \nA UHN-1 Huey helicopter crashed near the airstrip at Camp Rhino, and Marine spokesman Capt. Stewart Upton said two servicemen received minor injuries, one of them on the ground. The cause of the crash was under investigation, but Upton said, "We are 99 percent sure that the helicopter did not crash because of enemy fire." \nMany of the unconfirmed details of the surrender agreement came from Zaeef who said a former guerrilla leader from the war against the Soviets, Mullah Naqib Ullah, would take control of Kandahar within days. \n"Mullah Omar has taken the decision for the welfare of the people, to avoid casualties and to save the life and dignity of Afghans," Zaeef said, explaining the cleric's dramatic shift from earlier vows to defend his movement's home city until death. \nKarzai said the Taliban also agreed to give up provinces surrounding Kandahar which had remained under their control. The Taliban never held sway over all Afghanistan, but before U.S. bombing began Oct. 7, the militant militia held 90 percent of the country. \nUnder the withering U.S. air attacks in support of the northern alliance, the Taliban abandoned most of their ground, retreating to Kandahar and neighboring provinces. Bush launched the attacks after the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden. \nDifferences over the surrender deal among anti-Taliban forces arose as quickly as the fuzzy details of the agreement were made public. \nZaeef said the surrender called for Omar to live in Kandahar under the protection of the new local administration, which apparently prompted the negative response from Rumsfeld. \nKarzai sought to avoid any discussion of Omar's fate, telling The Associated Press that such issues "are the details that we still have to work out." \n"I'm not saying anything right now," he said. He refused to say whether Omar would face arrest. \nAnother anti-Pashtun leader, Gul Agha, was angered over being left out of the negotiations, according to his spokesman, Abdul Jabbar. The spokesman said Agha would not agree to any role for Naqib Ullah because he was "an ally of the Taliban." \nThe nature of the apparent threat that put the Marine base on alert was unclear. The lights were cut after officers detected what Capt. David Romley said "appears to be a credible threat." \n"It could be possible probing by the enemy," said Capt. Stewart Upton, another spokesman. Then again, he said: "We don't know that anything is going on." \nSince the Marines seized the desert airstrip Nov. 25, their only combat operation came on their second day, when Cobra helicopter gunships from the base helped warplanes from elsewhere attack a suspected hostile convoy that passed nearby. \nAfter weeks of incessant bombing around Kandahar, U.S. warplanes were quiet Thursday. It wasn't clear if the lull was ordered to facilitate the surrender negotiations or because of a stray bomb that killed three U.S. servicemen and wounded 20 others in the area a day earlier. \nIn other developments: \n• The U.N. Security Council unanimously endorsed the interim Afghan government and called on all groups to help restore peace. \n• Kyrgyzstan's parliament approved the use of the country's main international airport to base U.S. airplanes for Afghanistan. \n• A summit of 40 Afghan women in Belgium concluded with participants demanding parity with men in Afghanistan on jobs, salaries, education and health care. \n• Pakistan's foreign minister, Abdul Sattar, said his country will recognize the interim government in Afghanistan. Until recently, Pakistan was the Taliban's closest ally. \nNaqib Ullah, who reportedly was to take control of Kandahar, is a member of the Jamiat-e-Islami party of former President Burhanuddin Rabbani. In the 1980s, he led guerrilla forces against the Soviets and now heads one of several groups fighting the Taliban. \nZaeef said the handover would take three or four days. After that, he said, it would be up to Naqib Ullah to decide who can enter the city. Zaeef also said further talks would be held to determine the fate of Arab and other foreign fighters loyal to bin Laden. \nAlready, there were signs that the Taliban realized their fight was over. At Kandahar's airport, which Taliban fighters had fiercely defended for more than a week, forces under anti-Taliban Gen. Gul Agha said they marched in Thursday afternoon without a fight. \n"They (the Taliban) retreated. They didn't put up any resistance," said spokesman Abdul Jabbar.
(11/30/01 5:02am)
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Anti-Taliban fighters battled the Islamic militia Thursday on the outskirts of Kandahar, the ousted regime's last bastion, a key northern alliance commander said. The Taliban's supreme leader declared the decisive battle "has now begun." \nWitnesses described heavy bombing around the southern city over the past two days, and the Taliban reportedly hanged an Afghan man there Thursday after accusing him of helping Americans call in airstrikes. \nThe northern alliance's deputy defense minister, Bismillah Khan, told The Associated Press anti-Taliban fighters reached the eastern edge of Kandahar, the Taliban's birthplace and the only city still under their control, and "there is heavy fighting going on." \nIn Washington, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem said he could not confirm or deny that anti-Taliban fighters had entered Kandahar. He indicated northern alliance troops might be in the province of the same name, which covers a large area of southern Afghanistan. \n"I can accept that they have entered the province, but not in a large movement," he told reporters. \nSpeaking from the capital of Kabul in a series of calls, Khan said his information was based on radio communications with his commanders at the scene. He spoke in Dari and used the word "shahr," which means city, in reporting on the location of the troops. The Dari word for province is "wilaiyat." \nThe Taliban don't allow Western journalists into Kandahar and residents could not be contacted by telephone. \nSeeking to rally his followers, Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar urged his commanders in a radio message to defend their dwindling territory. \n"The fight has now begun. It is the best opportunity to achieve martyrdom," a Taliban official quoted Omar as saying. "Now we have the opportunity to fight against the infidels," meaning non-Muslims. The Taliban official spoke by telephone from the border town of Spinboldak on condition of anonymity. \nKandahar residents arriving at the Pakistani border town of Chaman said the Taliban appeared determined to defend Kandahar rather than abandon it as they did Kabul, Herat and other cities. \n"They gave the impression that they are ready to fight," said a man who identified himself by the single name of Ataullah. \nBut Stufflebeem said it was unclear how many Taliban leaders would stick with Omar, calling the Islamic movement "fractured." \n"There are some commanders who are negotiating for surrender of their forces. There are others who might take Mullah Omar's orders literally and intend to dig in defensively and fight to the death," Stufflebeem said. \nIn the center of Kandahar, at an intersection called Martyr's Crossing, the Taliban hanged a man they accused of pointing out potential bombing targets after he was caught speaking on a satellite telephone, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press reported. \nThis week, the alliance's foreign minister, Abdullah, said the alliance was dispatching Pashtun commanders to the south to work with Pashtuns who have rebelled against the Taliban. Some Pashtuns, Afghanistan's dominant group, are now coordinating operations with the alliance, which is mostly made up of ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks. \nForces loyal to Mullah Naqib, a Pashtun guerrilla commander in the war against the Soviets, and others allied with a former Kandahar governor, Gul Aga, have been moving on Kandahar for days. Gul Aga's fighters claim they are within 1 1/2 miles of the Kandahar airport. \nMore than 1,000 U.S. Marines began setting up a base in the desert of southern Afghanistan last weekend in preparation for a showdown with the Taliban. \nThe Taliban had controlled about 95 percent of Afghanistan before the northern alliance, backed by punishing U.S. airstrikes, forced them to abandon Kabul and most of the country this month. \nTaliban fighters withdrew to the ethnic Pashtun areas of the south where their movement was organized in the early 1990s. Taliban officials now claim to control four of the 30 Afghan provinces. \nPresident Bush launched military operations against Afghanistan on Oct. 7 after the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, the main suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. \nIn other developments: \n• At U.N.-sponsored talks in Germany, the northern alliance made a major concession that could pave the way for international peacekeepers to restore order in Afghanistan. The alliance dropped objections to an international force to help secure the peace during an interim administration that will govern until a council of tribal elders meets in March. \n• Alliance forces have captured Ahmed Abdel-Rahman, a bin Laden follower whose father is jailed in the United States for plotting to blow up New York's World Trade Center in 1993, according to several sources including U.S. officials and a lawyer. \n• Three Russian cargo planes with food, medicine and equipment for relief operations flew to Afghanistan, officials in Moscow said.
(11/14/01 4:21am)
KABUL, Afghanistan -- It was a day when the grisly and the joyous came together in the Afghan capital. Men exultantly shaved off their beards for the first time in years. They played music in public. A man impishly but unsuccessfully encouraged women on a bus to uncover their faces. \nIn a forested park of Kabul, a different story unfolded Tuesday. There, five men who had come to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban lay dead, their bodies riddled with bullets from a final gun battle. \nThe five, identified as Pakistanis, were among the foreign Muslim fighters, Arabs, Chechens and others, who are now targets for reprisal by Afghans who associate them with five years of oppressive Taliban rule. \nThere was unease too, that with the sudden, sweeping advances of the northern alliance, Afghanistan might slide back into the factional fighting that characterized the alliance's 1992-1996 rule over the country. \n"Today we are celebrating, but we worry that tomorrow they will start fighting again. We pray that won't happen," said Ahmed Rashef, who sat in a barber's chair for the first time in five years. \n"I hated this beard," he said. Being shaved "is like being free." \nThe barber, Zul Gai, smiled broadly. \n"This has been my best business day in many long years," he said. But he wasn't shaving off his bushy black beard just yet. \n"It's still too early," Gai said. "We will wait and see." \nThe Red Cross said the bodies of five Pakistanis and six Arab nationals were collected from different parts of the city. \nThe Pakistanis had climbed into trees and were firing randomly when northern alliance troops killed them in a hail of bullets, and went on firing into their corpses, witnesses said. \nThen the northern alliance men stuffed Afghani bank notes up the nose of one and into the gaping head wound of another, an Afghan way of implying an enemy is corrupt. Their bodies were taken away by the Red Cross.\nFour Arabs died when their pickup truck was blasted by a U.S.-made rocket. Their charred bodies were dragged from their vehicle by people who kicked and poked at them. \nTwo other Arabs were killed outside a military base near the United Nations guesthouse. Their bodies were covered with blankets and old clothes and thrown into the street. \nThrough Soviet occupation in the 1980s, the civil wars of the 1990s, the age of the Taliban and the U.S. bombings of the past month, Kabul has endured great suffering. The foreign fighters, many of them allied with Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, are particularly acute symbols of the Taliban and its militant brand of Islam. \nThat doctrine banned music, forced men to grow their beards to a prescribed length, empowered street enforcers to whip them into mosques to pray. Women were barred from work or school, and had to cover themselves from head to toe in tent-like robes called burqas. \nThe Taliban's alleged alliance with terrorism made Afghanistan an international pariah, and led to the U.S. bombing to force the surrender of bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States that killed thousands. \nSo the end of Taliban rule was described by many in Kabul as tantamount to being freed from prison, and Tuesday became a day of small but telling declarations of independence. \nSeveral people took their audiocassette recorders out of hiding and openly played music for the first time in five years. \nAbdul Rehman unwrapped his cassette recorder and let the voice of Ahmed Zaher, his favorite singer, blare in the street. \n"I used to play this at home, but very quietly, and then I would check to see if anyone was outside," he said. \nAn old man, his gray beard trimmed shorter than previously allowed, danced in the street holding a tape recorder that played music. Others renewed acquaintance with their freshly shaved faces. \n"Look, this feels so good!" said Ahmed Shah, rubbing his face. "I hated the beard. It was always itchy." \nThe women seemed cautious about dumping the Taliban rules. The burqa was commonplace attire in deeply conservative Afghanistan long before the Taliban made it mandatory, and on Tuesday most women kept theirs on despite the disappearance of the Taliban enforcers. \nIn a rickety old bus, a woman flipped her burqa up over her head. Male onlookers laughed. She quickly flipped it back. \nOne young northern alliance soldier gestured to the other women on the bus to take their burqas off, but got no response. Some looked away, or closed the window curtains. \n"For now we will leave the burqa on. We don't know yet who are these people in the city," said Mariam Jan, one of six women traveling to a wedding. Her husband, Mohammed Wazir, said: "It is our tradition. We are not sure that it will stop." \nHouses occupied by Taliban leaders in the once posh neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan were abandoned. The large steel doors of the home of former Health Minister Mullah Abbas Akhund were wide open. \nHomes were also abandoned on the so-called "street of guests," a reference to the Taliban's foreign volunteers. \nIn the money market in the old city, businessmen said departing Taliban soldiers emptied the stores of goods and money. One money-changer, who gave his name as Dr. Wali, said Taliban soldiers on tanks stopped in front of the shops, demanded the money and then drove out of the city.
(11/13/01 4:04am)
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Sitting hunched in a wooden chair outside his bicycle parts store in north Kabul, Saeed Abbas said he feared war would soon land on his doorstep. \nBolstered by their victories in northern Afghanistan and the fall of the key cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat, the opposition is now turning its sights on the capital of this war-shattered country. \nThe ruling Taliban have set up checkpoints at most key intersections in the capital, stopping vehicles, searching passengers and looking for possible infiltrators. \n"We hear the bombs falling on the front line and now that Mazar-e-Sharif is gone, we know that they will soon be coming here," Abbas said Sunday. \nAbbas is an ethnic Tajik like the titular head of the northern alliance, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and many of the fighters who make up the anti-Taliban opposition. \nHowever, the prospect of his fellow Tajiks and others in the alliance seizing power in Kabul again frightens Abbas. He and others remember the bitter infighting, the daily rocket barrages and the constant fear of death that marked the four years when factions now allied against the Taliban ruled Kabul. \nFrom 1992 until the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, the factions turned the city into a war zone, with each group controlling parts of the urban area. They flattened entire neighborhoods with rockets and mortars, and planted land mines and booby traps across vast areas. \nAbbas picked up one of two steel crutches that lay by his side. "We will need more of these," he said. \nHis left leg is missing above the knee. He stepped on a land mine planted by rival factions. \n"I was not a soldier. I was just going from one part of the city to the another, and this happened," he said, showing his amputated leg. \nPresident Bush has urged the opposition not to take Kabul before a new, broad-based government could be formed. But some opposition commanders at the front line north of the city were eager to advance. \nEarly Monday, the opposition claimed it launched attacks along two main roads connecting Kabul with the alliance-held Bagram air base. The attack stalled because of heavy Taliban resistance. \nThe northern alliance largely represents minority ethnic groups, such as Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. These ethnic groups dominate the northern half of the country, where the alliance has so far been successful. \nThe backbone of the Taliban are ethnic Pashtuns, the dominant group nationwide. \n"I don't care who is Tajik, who is Pashtun, who is Uzbek," Abbas said. "All I care about is that peace comes to Kabul." \nAbbas' fears are shared by many others in this city of 1 million. \n"We have no money," said Abdul Ahad, speaking in his threadbare, one-room cement shop in the city's Khair Khana district. "We can't escape." \nSaeed Ghana stepped into Ahad's shop and squatted down on the bicycle in one corner. He listened for a while before introducing himself. \n"I was a pilot," he said. "Now I am a porter." Ghana said he flew Russian-made MiG-21s for the pro-communist government during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He wears several layers of clothing to protect himself from the cold, all of them tattered and worn. He laughs when he talks about his job. \n"I should have run away when I could. I didn't, and now I can't," he said in a resigned voice. \n"Fighting has created a desert in this country. One leader is the same as another," Ghana said. "The people are not important, only power." \nA half-dozen men who have gathered all shake their heads in agreement. They are all wearing the long, unkempt beards demanded by the Taliban. The day is chilly, about 50 degrees. They are wrapped in traditional woolen shawls. \nThe conversation eventually turns to Osama bin Laden, accused by the United States of orchestrating the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. \n"We think that what happened there in America is very sad. We know that they must be very angry," said Shaft Allah, a gray-bearded teacher. "But we don't know where Osama is. We don't know how can they get Osama." \nAbdul Kabir, who clears unexploded ordnance from the city, said he has little hope for peace. \n"We have nowhere to go and no one who will bring an end to all our suffering," Kabir said as he browsed through used household items such as chipped plates and a bundle of forks tied with an elastic band. "Our stomachs are empty, our children have no future. What is left for us"
(11/02/01 6:07am)
KABUL, Afghanistan -- American warplanes raided Kabul on Thursday for the first time in four days, striking targets in the northern edge of the capital. The strikes came after U.S. jets pounded Taliban front lines and other strongholds. \nThree loud explosions, which appeared to be in the Khair Khana district, could be heard before midnight Thursday. Taliban gunners responded with bursts of anti-aircraft fire. \nThe targets under attack could not be determined because of a nighttime curfew, but Khair Khana includes a number of air defense and weapons storage sites. \nIt was unclear why the United States was resuming the strikes on Kabul. The last attack on the capital occurred Sunday morning and was apparently aimed at Taliban targets to the north and east of the city. \nEarlier Thursday, American planes carried out airstrikes around the Kala Kata garrison in northern Takhar province. Kala Kata is a Taliban garrison blocking the road to Taloqan, which the opposition northern alliance lost in September 2000. If the alliance retakes Taloqan, it would be easier for them to get supplies from neighboring Uzbekistan. \nThe raids came as Turkey, a NATO member, became the first Muslim nation to commit troops to U.S.-led coalition. The Turkish government announced it would send a 90-member special forces unit to train the troops of the northern alliance. \nAt a Pentagon news conference, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reported strikes Wednesday on a cave complex near Kabul. The Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, he said, use these caves as secure locations for personnel and equipment. \nHe said a large secondary explosion shown in a video clip "seems to indicate we may have hit ammunition or fuel in that cave." \nIn Afghanistan, opposition spokesman Waisuddin Salik said U.S. jets struck a Taliban fuel and ammunition dump near the opposition-controlled Bagram air base on the Kabul front overnight, destroying three fuel tanks and two trucks. \nIt was not immediately clear whether he and Myers were referring to the same strike. \nIn other developments: \n• A statement attributed to bin Laden and broadcast Thursday on the Qatari-based Al-Jazeera satellite channel criticized the government of Muslim Pakistan for standing "under the banner of the cross" and called on Pakistanis to "make Islam victorious." \n• In southern Afghanistan, foreign journalists were taken to Kili Chokar, a village where their Taliban escorts said 92 people died in a U.S. air raid. But at the cemetery, reporters counted only about 15 graves.
(10/10/01 4:03am)
KABUL, Afghanistan -- In the rubble of what had been an unassuming two-story building on Kabul's outskirts, Mohammed Afzl wept Tuesday for his brother, one of the first four confirmed civilian casualties of the U.S.-led air war against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. \n"My brother is buried under there," he said, watching bulldozers clear the remains of the offices of a U.N.-funded mine-clearing agency where the victims worked as guards. \nThe building in a quiet district of vegetable fields on the edge of the capital was less than 400 yards away from anti-aircraft batteries and a communication tower struck in U.S. raids Monday night. In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said it was not clear whether the building was hit by a U.S. missile or by anti-aircraft fire. \n"What can we do?" Afzl said, still crying as he recounted how he had begged his brother to spend the night with family instead of guarding the empty building. "Our lives are ruined." \nTuesday night, American warplanes were back in the skies, pounding areas around the Taliban headquarters. Planes screeched over the capital, sparking thunderous anti-aircraft fire and sending residents huddling back into whatever shelter they could find. \n"We just sit in the dark, watching the sky, waiting to die," said vegetable vendor Jamal Uddin, shutting down his shop as the lights went out Tuesday night. Power was cut in the city, and Taliban radio has been off the air since the second round of strikes wrecked transmitters. \nOfficials from the Taliban, the Islamic militia that rules Afghanistan, claimed Tuesday that dozens of people have died in the U.S.-led raids. But the four workers, whose bodies were recovered Tuesday, were the first civilian deaths to be independently confirmed. \nThe men were employed by Afghan Technical Consultants, an agency contracted by the United Nations to conduct mine clearing, a never-ending task in one of the world's most heavily mined countries. \nTheir offices were not far from a transmission tower knocked out in Monday's strikes and near anti-aircraft batteries and an ammunition storage sites that may also have been U.S. targets. \nStephanie Bunker, a U.N. spokeswoman, confirmed the deaths. She said the men hadn't been told to leave the building. But, she said, "we specifically instructed staff that if they feel endangered, they should abandon their duty situations." \nThe United Nations evacuated international staff from Afghanistan at the outset of the crisis, but Afghan nationals working for U.N. organizations or groups under U.N. contract remained behind. The mine-clearing agency said last week it had suspended operations. \nAlso Tuesday, the U.N. World Food Program said it would resume aid shipments to Afghanistan, a day after it suspended them because of the military strikes. The first shipment, a five-truck convoy carrying 100 tons of food, left Mashhad, Iran, for Herat Tuesday evening. \nBunker appealed for protection of civilians. "People need to distinguish between combatants and those innocent civilians who do not bear arms." \nAt the Pentagon, Rumsfeld expressed regret over the deaths, but said it was not verified that the U.S. fire was to blame. "We have no information that would let us know whether it was a result of ordnance fired from the air or the ordnance that we've seen fired from the ground on television," he said. \nRumsfeld said three days of air strikes against facilities of the al-Qaeda terror network and the Taliban's military had done enough damage to allow U.S. planes to fly day and night, a sign of U.S. confidence the flights were safe from air defenses. \nPlanes flew nearly constant sorties over Kandahar during the day Tuesday, Taliban sources said. A volley of strikes hit near the city in the morning. Raids resumed Tuesday night, pounding the home of the Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. He reportedly left his house outside Kandahar minutes before missiles struck it Sunday. \n"We can hear the explosions," said a Taliban soldier at the Kandahar garrison contacted by telephone Tuesday night. "There is darkness all around us. Our anti-aircraft guns are trying to target them but they are flying at a very high altitude." He refused to give his name. \nMullah Omar was in radio contact with senior Taliban commanders to assure them he was alive and in command, Taliban sources said. Afghan sources, contacted from Pakistan, said communications and air defenses at the Kandahar airport had taken a beating in the air strikes. \nIn Herat, about 100 miles from the Iranian border, heavy strikes blasted military sites around the city as well as a position at the airport that previous strikes had failed to hit, a Taliban official in the city said. \nBefore Tuesday's sorties began, the Taliban said bin Laden was alive and still in the country. The United States launched the strikes after weeks of pushing the Taliban to hand over bin Laden, the top suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. \n"He is alive, his health is very good and he is in Afghanistan," the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, told CNN. \n"In this freestyle game, Washington is aiming firstly to hunt the sitting Islamic government in Afghanistan and then every committed Muslim in the name of terrorism," Zaeef said. But he insisted the Taliban were still "strong" and said there were no casualties among the ranks of the movement's fighters. \nIn Afghanistan's north, the rebel military alliance continued to confront Taliban troops. The fighting came close to the border with neighboring Tajikistan at several points, said Russian border guards. \nA northern alliance spokesman, Abdullah, told CNN that the rebels were stepping up the pressure. "The Taliban are in a really hard situation at this moment in northern Afghanistan," said Abdullah, who uses one name. \nMeanwhile, the Taliban arrested a French journalist who slipped into the country disguised in eastern Afghanistan along with two Pakistani companions, the Afghan Islamic Press reported. The Frenchman, who was arrested with two Pakistanis, was to be charged with espionage, the news agency said. \nAn editor for the French weekly news magazine Paris Match said a staff member, Michel Peyrard, telephoned him late Monday from Pakistan and said he planned to enter Afghanistan. \nOn Monday, the Taliban released a British journalist, Yvonne Ridley, who had been arrested while sneaking into the country last month. Still in custody are eight international relief workers, including two Americans, who were arrested in August for allegedly preaching Christianity.
(10/03/01 3:49am)
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Poison gas. Explosives. Hand-to-hand combat. Knives. And religious exhortations. \nThe 11-volume "Manual of Afghan Jihad," or holy war, makes chilling reading, a how-to guide to what it calls the "basic rules of sabotage and destruction." \nMost of the information can be gleaned from Internet Web sites, experts say, and another manual, written for Muslim operatives abroad and not part of the 11-volume set, was discovered last year during an investigation of Osama bin Laden. \nBut intelligence analysts from two Western countries who read part of the "Manual of Afghan Jihad," and who spoke on condition of anonymity, said its highly technical detail, including diagrams, represents a new level of sophistication in the training apparatus of bin Laden's network. \nThe volumes were obtained by The Associated Press from a former Afghan guerrilla who said he got them from a Libyan fighter. He said the Libyan, who had fallen out with his comrades, stole them in July from the headquarters of bin Laden's organization in Kandahar, also the home base of Afghanistan's Taliban rulers. \nThe preface to Mouswada al Jihad al Afghani, the Arabic name of the manual, says it was compiled by "The Services Office of the Training Camps," and that this "Services Office" was founded by bin Laden. It is meant for use in the battle against "the enemies of our movement, the enemies of Allah, for any Islamic group." \nEach volume begins with dedications to, among others, bin Laden, who "took part in jihad with his life and money in Afghanistan ..."; Abdullah Azzam, an Palestinian killed during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan; Islamic leaders in Afghanistan; and the people and government of neighboring Pakistan, which has long supported the Taliban regime. \nThe 11 volumes, ranging from 250 to 500 pages each, are written in Arabic, with occasional indexes in English. Excerpts were translated for AP. \nEach has a specific area of expertise. "What's your desire?" the text asks, then takes the reader step by step through the acquiring and mixing various explosive materials. Other sections tell how to blow up a plane, engage an armored vehicle, surround an airport, spy on a military base. \nA volume on hand-to-hand combat has a chapter on "how to threaten with a knife, piercing with a knife." In the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States, in which bin Laden is the suspected mastermind, hijackers were believed to have been armed with knives or box-cutters.
(09/12/01 5:13am)
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Afghanistan's hardline Taliban rulers rejected suggestions that Osama bin Laden, whom they are sheltering, could be behind the devastating terrorist attacks in the United States Tuesday.\n"We have tried our best in the past, and we are willing in the future to assure the United States in any kind of way we can that Osama is not involved in these kinds of activities," the Taliban's foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, told reporters.\nMuttawakil said Tuesday's attacks on New York, Washington and elsewhere in the United States were "from a humanitarian point of view surely a loss and a very terrifying incident." Asked whether the Taliban condemned the attacks, he said: "We have criticized and we are now again criticizing terrorism in all its forms."\nBin Laden, the exiled Saudi millionaire indicted in the United States on charges of masterminding the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, has lived here since 1996 under the protection of the ruling Taliban religious militia. Washington accuses him of running an international terrorist network.\nA London-based Arab journalist said Tuesday that followers of bin Laden warned three weeks ago that they would carry out a "huge and unprecedented attack" on U.S. interests.\nAbdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, said he received a warning from Islamic fundamentalists close to bin Laden but did not take the threat seriously.\n"They said it would be a huge and unprecedented attack but they did not specify," Atwan said in a telephone interview in London.\n"We usually receive this kind of thing. At the time we did not take the warnings seriously as they had happened several times in the past and nothing happened. "This time it seems his people were accurate and meant every word they said."\nAtwan, who interviewed bin Laden in 1996 and has since maintained contacts with his followers, said he believed the attack on the World Trade Center in New York was the work of "an Islamic fundamentalist group" close to bin Laden.\nBut Abdul Hai Muttmain, the spokesman for the Taliban's reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, dismissed allegations that bin Laden could be behind the attacks in the United States.\n"Such a big conspiracy, to have infiltrated in such a major way is impossible for Osama," Muttmain told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. He said bin Laden does not have the facilities to orchestrate such a major assault within the United States.\nThe Taliban say bin Laden's communications have been taken away from him, but several sources close to him -- including his family members in Saudi Arabia -- say bin Laden has regular access to satellite telephones and other sophisticated communication equipment.\nMeanwhile, foreign aid workers and even Taliban commanders, who have spoken on condition of anonymity, say the number of Arab nationals in Afghanistan has increased in recent months.\n"They are in Kabul, Herat, Jalalabad. They have training centers in every province of Afghanistan," said one Taliban commander who would not give his name.\nThe Taliban, which espouses a harsh brand of Islamic law, has resisted U.S. demands to hand over bin Laden.\nAfter the attacks in East Africa three years ago, Washington retaliated with a blistering missile attack in August 1998, sending more than 70 Tomahawk cruise missiles into eastern Afghanistan apparently targeting training camps operated by bin Laden.\nThe U.S. attacks killed about 20 followers of bin Laden's, but bin Laden escaped unhurt. Since then he has been forced by the Taliban rulers to stop giving interviews and making statements.\nIn Kabul foreign aid workers were keeping a low profile and security measures were heightened with most expatriates being advised to stay in their homes for fear of retaliatory attacks from the United States should evidence implicate bin Laden.\nBut Muttawakil said there is no fear among the Taliban.\n"Since there is no reason for an attack and we are not expecting any reprisal attack we are not taking any precautions," he said.