PESHAWAR, Oct 12: Body parts, household belongings and at least one unexploded bomb litter the countryside around an Afghan village destroyed in a US attack, a Taliban official said after witnessing the devastation on Friday.

Sher Sha Hamdard, an official with the Taliban’s Bakhter news agency in the eastern city of Jalalabad, said the stench of corpses and rotting livestock around the village of Kadam was almost unbearable.

“I hate to say this, but I’m glad I saw these things because the world has to know what the Americans have done here,” he said after his visit to the village, some 40 kilometres west of Jalalabad, on Friday.

The Taliban have also invited other international television stations to visit the scene.

Hamdard said the village was totally destroyed, and a nearby cave system had collapsed, trapping an unknown number of people who were believed to have taken shelter there when the US attack began overnight Wednesday.

Taliban troops were sifting through the rubble in search of survivors, but Hamdard said hopes of finding any seemed lost.

Dazed and confused villagers, including several with horrific injuries, were taking shelter where they could. The village had no clean water.

“I wish I had also died because now I have no one,” the Taliban official quoted Laljan, a wounded villager, as saying.

Laljan lost 11 members of his extended family in the attack.

Other survivors told similar stories of entire families being wiped out in the bombardment, which is believed to have been targeting alleged terrorist training camps of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network.

Residents said they could not understand why a peaceful, impoverished village had been bombed, adding there had been a training camp in the area but it had been abandoned a long time ago.

Hamdard said an unexploded bomb, measuring 1.5 metres long, was lying near the remains of the village.

“So far 160 bodies have been recovered, mostly women and children,” a spokesman for Afghanistan’s ruling militia told the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press earlier on Thursday.

“This is not an exaggeration. More bodies are still being recovered.”

The Taliban claim at least 200 people died in the attack, mainly women, children and the elderly because the men were away on the frontlines fighting anti-Taliban opposition forces.

Jalalabad and the surrounding areas have been the target of repeated US attacks since air strikes began on Sunday.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday dismissed Taliban claims that Washington was targeting civilians, but expressed regret for the loss of “any lives”.

UNHCR: The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, called on Friday for a pause in the US-led air strikes against Afghanistan so vital aid could reach civilians before winter sets in.