KABUL, Oct 16: The United States on Tuesday sent one of the most devastating weapons in its arsenal to strafe the stronghold of the Taliban.

US forces attacked the southern city of Kandahar with an air force AC-130 gunship, a slow-moving, low-flying turbo-prop ground attack plane that can carry five gunners, a senior defence official said.

The plane, which can circle around a target using infrared sensors and radar to direct a precise deluge of cannon fire, was used against a Taliban troop complex in Kandahar.

Experts said deployment of the AC-130s could also indicate that US forces were preparing to send ground troops to hunt down Osama bin Laden.

One US defence official said the AC-130 gunship that attacked Taliban militia positions around Kandahar was capable of laying down “withering fire” on ground positions.

The use of such low-flying weapons was evidence that the first phase of the war was complete, said the opposition Northern Alliance, which is pressing forward its advance on the strategic city of Mazar-i-Sharif, near the Uzbekistan border.

In Kabul, columns of smoke blackened the clear autumn skies after a series of bombs had appeared to hit a fuel dump just outside the airport. It emerged later that the smoke was from the strike on the ICRC compound.

In Kandahar, famed for the graceful minarets of the Ahmad Shah Baba mausoleum, the attacks were so intense that residents were enveloped in a lung-racking cloud of dust, the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) said.

At least nine people were killed and 22 wounded in the raids on Kandahar, the agency said. Four civilians were killed and eight wounded in strikes on Lal Mohammad village, some 30kms to the northwest of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s information ministry official Abdul Hanan Himat said.

The southern city is the powerbase of Mullah Mohammad Omar, the hardline movement’s reclusive leader.

“Yesterday (Monday), around 130 sorties alone were carried out against Kandahar, so you can imagine the civilian casualties as the attacks, experience shows, miss their targets,” Himat said.

WARPLANES: US forces used more than 100 planes in Monday’s bombing raids, a record in the air campaign against targets in Afghanistan, Lt Gen Gregory Newbold, director of operations at the military joint staff, said on Tuesday.—Agencies