Four Afghan workers for a UN-affiliated mine-clearing agency were killed in an American air assault, the UN said yesterday, the first independent confirmation of civilian deaths since the US-led air strikes began.
Also yesterday, a group of commanders from the ruling Taliban militia reportedly switched sides and closed the only road linking north and south Afghanistan, a senior opposition Northern Alliance official said yesterday.
"About 40 commanders with 1,200 men under arms joined the alliance and closed the Bagram-Bamiyan road to the Taliban on Monday night," said Abdullah Abdullah, foreign minister of the opposition Northern Alliance.
"There wasn't any fighting, they basically came right over," he said. "Without that road the Taliban can only supply the north of Afghanistan by the road leading from Kabul all the way to the west via Herat."
The Northern Alliance has already blocked the Salang Pass which commands the highway linking Kabul with cities in the north.
Four bombs fell near the airport in the southern city of Kandahar on the third night of US-led air raids on Afghanistan, an official of the ruling Taliban movement said yesterday.
Taliban troops opened fire with anti-aircraft guns on the attacking planes but did not hit them, he said by telephone from Kandahar.
The official, Maulvi Mohammad Akhtar Usmani, said he had no reports so far of any casualties or damage from the raid.
The UN appealed for the protection of civilians in Afghanistan as air strikes continued for the first time into the daylight hours. The Taliban stronghold of Kandahar was hit at mid-morning, but it was not clear whether the planes striking it were American.
The Taliban, meanwhile, said Osama bin Laden was alive, well and in Afghanistan. The Afghan rulers' refusal to give up bin Laden, chief suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, triggered the US-led raids that began Sunday.
Yesterday morning's attacks followed a second night of US air strikes around Kabul and in northern Afghanistan, where a rebel alliance has been fighting Taliban troops.
The US has emphasized that it is not targeting civilians in the attacks. The mine-clearing agency's office where the workers were killed Monday night was close to a Taliban radio transmission tower, a possible target of the raid.
"People need to distinguish between combatants and those innocent civilians who do not bear arms," UN spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker told a news conference in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
The Taliban claimed yesterday that dozens of people have been killed in the US-led raids, and accused the US of deliberately hitting civilian targets. There was no independent confirmation of the Taliban figures.
"Washington is aiming to hunt the sitting Islamic government in Afghanistan and then every committed Muslim, in the name of terrorism," Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban envoy to Pakistan, told reporters in Islamabad.
Later, Zaeef said that bin Laden had survived the raids, and that the Taliban would not hand him over.
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