“Strikes continue,” a Pentagon official said, as nightfall in Afghanistan was marked with renewed anti-aircraft fire in the southern Taliban stronghold Kandahar and the eastern city of Jalalabad, and a powercut in Kabul.
On Monday, a US missile strike killed four Afghans working for a United Nations mine disposal team in Kabul and on Tuesday relief agencies said safety fears had forced them to suspend aid convoys into Afghanistan.
But despite the apparent targeting error, Pentagon officials said the raids appeared to be doing their job, striking the residential compound of the Taliban’s shadowy supreme leader, Mulla Mohammad Omar.
“ He is alive, thank God. There were strikes around the house, but he had vacated it,” the Taliban ambassador in Islamabad, Abdul Salam Zaeef, said.
The Pentagon said the compound had been a “legitimate target” housing command and control facilities of the sort which an Afghan opposition spokesman said had been all but crippled by the three-day bombardment.
“ The Taliban have lost their military capacity to a large extent,” Abdullah of the Northern Alliance told CNN. “Their air power has been destroyed, most of their headquarters destroyed and their control system severely disturbed.”
The Pentagon said that US forces’ target list had been expanded to include Taliban armour as well as air defences, as the campaign aimed to expose the militia to attack from the Northern Alliance and to further airstrikes.
But another key target of the campaign, the head of the al Qaeda network, Osama bin Laden, was reported to have survived the blitz.
“He is alive,” Zaeef told CNN, “He is not in a location that is known to the people. He is in the mountains for his security.”
In Florida one man has died and another is sick in hospital after they were infected by the anthrax bacteria, raising fears that the office where they worked for a chain of US newspapers was attacked with a biological agent.
Officials appealed for calm, and federal agents denied reports of a third case hundreds of kilometres away in Virginia, but Washington has not ruled out the possibility of a criminal attack.
The two men worked for American Media, which publishes supermarket tabloids that have published unflattering profiles of Osama, and some of the hijackers involved in the Sept 11 attacks had stayed in Florida.
In Pakistan relief agencies said that the airstrikes had forced the suspension of aid into drought-wracked, war-weary Afghanistan.
“We are observing the situation and we’ll decide when it’s best to enter,” United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) spokesman Gordon Weiss said, “We will send in supplies whenever we can but it depends on the security situation.”
US officials said they would couple the military strikes with a second drop of 37,000 food packages for isolated groups of refugees, while Iran’s official news agency reported that 20,000 Afghans had fled across the border.
Some aid was getting over the border from Iran, however, as a seven-truck convoy arrived in a barren frontier’s no-man’s land carrying blankets and medicines — a “drop in the ocean” UNICEF officials said.—AFP