Airstrikes continue in Afghanistan

The Associated Press Residents look at damage caused by
U.S.-British airstrikes to an alleged United Nations building in
Kabul, Afghanistan Tuesday. The U.S. hit key installments of the
Taliban regime.

By Kathy Gannon and Amir
Shah
The Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan “”mdash; The United States launched a third
night of attacks on Afghanistan on Tuesday, striking around
Kandahar, the Taliban headquarters, and the northwestern city of
Herat, Taliban officials said.

The new round of strikes came after the first confirmation of
civilian casualties from the U.S. attacks. Four workers for a
U.N.-affiliated mine-clearing agency in an office located a half
mile from anti-aircraft batteries in Kabul were killed Monday
night.

A Taliban soldier, reached by telephone at a garrison in the
southern city of Kandahar late Tuesday, said the Americans were
hitting targets near but not inside the city.

“We can hear the explosions,” he said, refusing to
give his name. “There is darkness all around us. Our
anti-aircraft guns are trying to target them but they are flying at
a very high altitude.” Taliban sources said the home of
Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, about nine miles
outside Kandahar, was struck for the third time.

In Herat, the strikes targeted military sites on the edge of the
city and the airport, including a site near the airport that three
cruise missiles failed to hit earlier, another Taliban official
said.

A Bush administration official in Washington confirmed the new
round of nighttime strikes.

Earlier, the Taliban said Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in
the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States, had survived the
bombings, and they repeated their refusal to hand him over to the
United States.

“He is alive, his health is very good and he is in
Afghanistan,” the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam
Zaeef, told CNN. He also said Mullah Omar, who had left his house
on Sunday night, was alive.

Kandahar was also struck Tuesday morning ““ the first
daylight bombing of the campaign. That attack came after a second
night of U.S. raids targeting areas around Kabul and in the north,
where an opposition alliance has been fighting the Taliban for
years.

The mine-clearing agency’s office on the edge of Kabul,
where the four security guards were killed, was a half-mile from
anti-aircraft artillery batteries and a Taliban transmission tower.
The tower was knocked out during the strikes Monday night.

U.N. spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker said the security guards, who
were privately hired by a mine-clearing agency contracted by the
United Nations, were spending the night in the office and
hadn’t been warned or told to relocate.

“It was assumed they were safe where they were. Otherwise,
they would have been relocated for sure,” Bunker said in the
Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

“I think Afghans in general are aware of what’s
where,” Bunker said, referring to potential targets.
“We specifically instructed staff that if they feel
endangered, they should abandon their duty situations.”

She appealed for the U.S.-led coalition to take care not to hurt
civilians. “People need to distinguish between combatants and
those innocent civilians who do not bear arms.”

The 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 its operations.

The United States has emphasized that it is not targeting
civilians in the attacks.

The Taliban said Tuesday that dozens of people have been killed
in the U.S.-led raids, launched after weeks of fruitless attempts
to get Afghanistan’s rulers to hand over bin Laden. There was
no independent confirmation of the Taliban claim.

“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 told
reporters in Islamabad.

The envoy said there were no casualties among the ranks of the
Taliban fighters. “The Taliban are very strong,” he
said.

In Afghanistan’s north, the northern alliance continued to
confront Taliban troops. The fighting came close to the border with
neighboring Tajikistan at several points, said Russian border
guards.

Kabul residents spent another sleepless night amid the roar of
explosions and the rattle of anti-aircraft guns. Adam Khan and his
family of five were fleeing Tuesday on a truck piled high with
belongings, heading out of the capital to an eastern district to
escape more strikes.

They had been sleeping in their basement during the bombardment,
he said. “All night the women and children were
crying,” he said. “They were very worried ““
scared.”

Targets in Monday night’s raids included the airport in
Kabul in addition to the hill where the transmission tower is
located, according to the private Afghan Islamic Press agency in
Islamabad.

The tower was once used for television transmissions, but the
Taliban have banned television since they came to power in 1996. It
was not clear whether or how the tower was used since.

Early Tuesday, sitting in front of the mine-clearing
agency’s collapsed two-story building in Kabul’s
eastern Macroyan neighborhood, Mohammed Afzl wept. His brother was
one of the four workers killed, and he waited for bulldozers to
clear the rubble and remove the bodies. A fifth person was injured
in the strike.

“My brother is buried under there,” he said.
“What can we do? Our lives are ruined.”

U.S. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, said the bombardment Monday night was accompanied by a
renewed air drop of humanitarian assistance. Humanitarian groups
have said, however, that such airdrops are much less effective than
road deliveries.

Britain, which participated in the first wave of assaults
Sunday, did not take part in Monday’s follow-up.

Before Monday’s attacks began, President Bush vowed to be
“relentless” in fighting terrorism “on all
fronts.” And in an indication the United States might
eventually want to expand the military operation, Washington
notified the U.N. Security Council on Monday that its
counterterrorism attacks may be extended beyond Afghanistan. The
Taliban are still holding eight international relief workers,
including two Americans, who allegedly preached Christianity in
Muslim Afghanistan.