Daylight raids intensify

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This article was published 06/12/2001 (8950 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

KABUL, Afghanistan — In the biggest daylight raids so far, U.S. jets pounded targets around Afghanistan’s capital yesterday and attacked a military headquarters and suspected terrorist training camp near the eastern city of Jalalabad.

In neighbouring Pakistan, Muslim militants launched a nationwide strike to protest their government’s support for the U.S.-led air campaign in Afghanistan. The strike call, which drew only a limited response, came as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived in Islamabad for talks with Pakistan on the air campaign.

The daylight raids on Afghanistan opened with jets streaking across the dawn sky over Kabul, striking in the area of the airport and a military base. Throughout the day, wave after wave of bombers, some too high to be heard in the streets below, pounded suspected military targets in the northwest of the capital.

A lone jet bombed the outskirts of the eastern city Jalalabad as shoppers went about their errands at an open market in the city centre.

Planes later struck a military headquarters near the Jalalabad airport, a bin Laden training camp at Tora-Bora and a third target near the village of Karam. The Taliban say up to 200 people were killed when U.S. jets hit homes in Karam last week.

Each raid drew anti-aircraft fire from Taliban forces. “The Taliban just laugh at these bombs,” said Mufti Yousuf, a Taliban envoy accompanying international journalists to Jalalabad. “It is nothing. It makes no difference.”

Kabul hospitals were without electricity overnight, since the Taliban switch off the power during raids. Doctors said relatives were taking patients home and added they were unable to care for premature babies without electricity for the incubators.

“Please have mercy on us and don’t kill us,” pleaded Rahim Biba, the mother of an infant born two months premature. “We are innocent. We are not followers of Osama and we are not members of his militant group. We are already in trouble. Don’t add to our miseries.”

In Washington, Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld insisted that the United States was not targeting civilians. He said the United States had begun dropping leaflets and making aerial broadcasts delivering that message to the Afghan people.

Rumsfeld suggested strikes might soon start targeting Taliban positions on the front lines of the battle with Afghan opposition forces. He said U.S. planes have targeted such areas little so far because of “less-than-perfect targeting information.

“I suspect that in the period ahead that’s not going to be a very safe place to be” for the Taliban, he said. “We hope to have improved targeting information in the period ahead.

The the northern-based opposition alliance claimed yesterday to have advanced to within six kilometres of the airport at Mazar-e-Sharif, the largest city in northern Afghanistan, held since 1998 by the Taliban. There was no immediate comment from the Taliban.

Abdul Vadud, the military attache in the alliance’s embassy in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, also said 4,000 Taliban fighters under a single commander surrendered to the rebels Sunday near the village of Sangchorak, northeast of Kabul.

Taliban Information Minister Qudratullah Jamal denied that claim and said the commander in question had never had 4,000 soldiers under his authority.

Meanwhile, Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden will most likely end up in U.S. hands — dead or alive — within the next 30 days, U.S. Sen. Bob Graham said yesterday.

“I am optimistic that we will be able to accomplish that objective and accomplish it within the next 30 days,” said Graham, chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, during a morning meeting with reporters.

Saying his knowledge is based on privileged information, he refused to give any details.

But the Florida Democrat said the next month is critical in the quest to find the man believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania because the holy Muslim month of Ramadan begins in mid-November and the winter weather in Afghanistan begins to worsen at the same time.

— AP, South Florida Sun-Sentinel