KABUL, Oct 28: The US-led campaign against the Taliban suffered a fresh setback on Sunday when at least 10 civilians were killed after a bomb hit three houses in Kabul.

Eight members of one family — a father, mother and their three sons and three daughters — were among the dead, witnesses said. One man was decapitated.

Ahib Dad, a 45-year-old father-of-four, held his dead baby son in his arms and wept uncontrollably at the scene of the attack.

“I heard the sound of the plane and I came out to see which way it was going. Suddenly it bombed our home. I lost two of my children,” he said.

One grieving old man added: “These are infidels, they want to eliminate Muslims and Islam. There was nothing to be bombed in this house.”

As the pounding of the Afghan capital entered a fourth week, US forces also mounted attacks on the key northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar and the cities of Herat and Jalalabad. Three people were reportedly killed.

A senior opposition general late on Sunday said US warplanes had also bombed Taliban positions in northeast Afghanistan, close to the Tajikistan border, for the first time.

Atiqullah Baryalai, a vice defence minister and general for the opposition Northern Alliance, said 10 bombs were dropped but not all of them hit their targets.

Witnesses to the misguided strike in Kabul said the bomb was one of four dropped on the capital early on Sunday and which destroyed three houses in the Char Qala area of the city around 7:00 am (0230 GMT).

The latest deaths bring to 37 the number of civilian casualties in and around Kabul since United States bombing began on October 7.

Taliban officials claim more than 1,000 civilians have died. The US has dismissed this figure as propaganda.

But the stray bomb on Kabul added to a growing list of US bombing blunders.

A foreign ministry official from the Northern Alliance confirmed on Sunday a US bomb the previous day hit a village on territory it controlled.

Accounts of the bomb’s impact varied, with some reports suggesting 10 people had died. But sources who visited the village on Sunday could confirm only one dead.

Despite the intense bombing campaign, the Taliban’s leader, Mulla Mohammed Omar, remained defiant.

“We have not yet begun the real war against the United States because of their technological superiority,” he said in an interview# published on Sunday in Algerian newspaper El Youm.

“We will give (the Americans) a more bitter lesson than the one we gave the Russians,” Omar added.

UNICEF AID: Meanwhile, UNICEF is stepping up its aid effort to the Afghan region of Herat amid mounting concern over the conditions facing Afghan children, particularly over malnutrition, with winter snows fast approaching, its Tehran representative said in an interview with AFP in Tehran on Sunday.