US jets pounded Taliban front-line positions north of the capital Kabul yesterday as rebel forces vowed to fight on despite the capture and hanging of a key opposition figure by the Taliban.
Pakistan's president, meanwhile, warned in a US television interview that the war in Afghanistan could become a "quagmire" for the US and its allies. Nearly three weeks of daily air attacks have failed to break the Taliban's hold on Afghanistan or enable the opposition Northern Alliance to make significant advances against the Taliban.
PHOTO: REUTERS
In the north of Afghanistan, US jets roaring over the opposition-held Shomali plain swooped down and dropped massive bombs in some of the heaviest bombardment of the Taliban positions to date.
Taliban fighters responded by firing surface-to-air guns at the American warplanes and rockets and mortars at fighters of the opposition movement known as the northern alliance. Explosions from all sides rang out at the front-line at Jom Qadam, 40km north of Kabul.
Outside the strategic northern town of Mazar-e-Sharif, the Taliban claimed yesterday to have beaten back a new opposition push. Taliban forces captured five opposition commanders in Friday's battle, and immediately hanged them publicly, Taliban officials told the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press.
That reported setback came on the heels of Friday's summary execution by Taliban forces of opposition leader Abdul Haq, who had crossed into Afghanistan to try to persuade Afghan tribal leaders to abandon the Taliban and throw their support to exiled former Afghan king Mohammad Zaher Shah.
``If one Abdul Haq is dead, I think a thousand more Abdul Haqs will come up,'' his brother Abdul Qadir, a senior rebel commander, said at his home in the opposition-controlled town of Jabal Saraj.
The president of Pakistan, which has allied itself with the US in the campaign against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, suggested in an interview with ABC News that the Pentagon appeared to be having trouble making headway in Afghanistan.
"If the military objectives are such that their attainment is causing difficulty, their identification is causing difficulty, their locations are causing difficulty, then yes, it may be a quagmire," said the Pakistani leader, General Pervez Musharraf.
In Kabul, overnight raids claimed at least two civilian lives, said Mohammed Ullah, a physician at the hospital where the bodies were taken. Shrapnel killed one man and a stray bullet struck the other victim on his rooftop as he watched the fiery sky, the doctor said.
Roving Taliban artillery guns, mounted on pickup trucks for quick getaways, answered US blasts with bright bursts of anti-aircraft fire.
US bombs honed in on the Taliban's sprawling military compound in Kabul, just across from the long-abandoned US Embassy. Other strikes hit an ammunition depot on the city's eastern edge overnight, sparking off bright-red explosions.
At sunrise yesterday, US jets hammered near northern hills on the city's edge, toward Kabul's airport -- a repeated target of attacks. They also struck areas around Nishrab and Tagab, about 50 km northeast of Kabul.
The Taliban's Bakhtar News Agency said six people were killed, 12 injured and 15 houses destroyed. "Fortunately, they were empty," it added.
Bombs also struck near Jalalabad in eastern Nangarhar province, Bakhtar said. The report could not be independently confirmed.
Overnight, jets pounded northern Afghanistan's Dar-e-Suf district of northern Samangan province, Bakhtar said, but added that "there was no change in the front line and we don't know about casualties."
In other attacks-related developments:
-- The International Committee of the Red Cross said it deplored a strike on its warehouse in Kabul -- the second this month. The Pentagon said it was an accident. The ICRC, in a statement issued in Geneva, said the warehouse had contained the bulk of the food and blankets it intended to distribute to tens of thousands of needy Afghans.
-- French journalist Michel Peyrard will stand trial for espionage and other charges within a few days, the Afghan Islamic Press said yesterday. Peyrard, a journalist for Paris Match who was arrested Oct. 9, is in good heath, the agency quoted an unnamed Taliban official as saying. The official was quoted as saying "we have charged him with spying and other allegations," but he did not elaborate.
-- Thousands of would-be fighters headed from northern Pakistan toward the Afghan border yesterday at an influential cleric's request, vowing to help protect Afghanistan and the Taliban from any incursion by US ground forces.
-- A top UN official has dismissed calls for a pause in airstrikes to allow more aid into Afghanistan, saying the US-led military assault had not significantly disrupted aid flow. Kenzo Oshima, the UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told the BBC yesterday that more aid was urgently needed, but that a bombing pause was not necessary to achieve humanitarian goals.
-- Pakistani authorities headed north yesterday to reclaim portions of the fabled Silk Route after pro-Taliban militants blocked it with boulders and planted land mines along its shoulders.
Traffic along the Karakoram Highway, a major trade link between Pakistan and China, has all but stopped since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
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