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Taliban Stronghold Bombarded as U.S. Switches to Low-Level Attacks
KABUL, Oct 16 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The military onslaught against Afghanistan took a decisive turn Tuesday with U.S. forces bombing the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in the first low-level aerial attacks of the campaign, which began its second week this Sunday.
Residents said intense U.S. raids continued throughout the morning with planes buzzing overhead and repeated explosions around the southern city. Targets inside the capital, Kabul, were hit early this afternoon.
The daytime raids followed all-night attacks involving at least two AC-130 gunships - a heavily armored plane with formidable cannon firepower and a helicopter-like ability to move slowly over battlegrounds.
U.S. defense officials, who described the latest round of bombing as "robust", confirmed the deployment of the AC-130 over Kandahar, the home of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, news agencies reported.
A U.S. defense official said the gunships targeted a headquarters and "troop complex" in Kandahar.
Their use marked a significant departure for a campaign, which since its launch on October 7th, has been conducted by fighter jets flying at high altitude to avoid Taliban air defenses.
About 50 tactical aircraft and 10 long-range bombers took part in air attacks Monday, striking troop concentrations, equipment gathered for deployment, marshaling areas and surface-to-air missile storage sites.
"It was dark and we could not see the planes but they did not sound like jets," one Kandahar resident told Agence France-Presse (AFP), describing the AC-130s which Taliban officials initially described as helicopters.
"Now we can feel the bombs coming from every direction," he added as bombs continued to pound the Kandahar area throughout the morning.
The head of the Taliban's information agency, Abdul Hanan Hemat, said the Kandahar raids left 33 civilians dead, five after a medical clinic was bombed.
Thus far there have been reports that over 400 Afghans have been killed in the bombing raids, an overwhelming majority being civilians, mostly women and children.
The Pentagon last week confirmed that one of its precision-guided missiles "missed" its intended target over a mile away and slammed into a village, killing civilians and razing houses to the ground.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld earlier described Taliban figures for civilian casualties as "ridiculous" and dismissed claims that more than 200 people had died last week in the eastern village of Kadam.
Rumsfeld claimed that tunneled-out caves stuffed with munitions had been destroyed in Kadam, sparking massive secondary explosions, which may have damaged nearby villages.
General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs Staff, said the village displayed no bomb craters, and U.S. photo reconnaissance showed it was not densely occupied, if at all, at the time of the strike.
But foreign journalists who were taken to the village over the weekend said they could see at least one crater amid the devastation.
In Kabul, at least seven loud explosions were heard in early Tuesday, one causing a huge plume of black smoke to mass over the north of the city where a military compound is believed to be located.
Kabul's beleaguered population woke Tuesday to find their electricity cut off after bombs struck the main power station, but by late afternoon it had been restored. Bombing earlier this week had disabled the city's international telephone exchange.
The use of the AC-130 was seen as another sign that the U.S. is fast moving towards the deployment of troops inside Afghanistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington.
U.S. officials also said leaflets had been dropped in three remote rural areas showing a picture of a U.S. soldier shaking hands with a turbaned Afghan.
The anti-Taliban Northern Alliance has offered to cooperate with the U.S. air attacks but its ground forces just 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Kabul have remained idle.
Sporadic fighting continued Tuesday near the airport outside the strategic northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, south of the border with Uzbekistan.
"We are near Mazar-i-Sharif airport. We expect to take the city within the next day or two, but we will do it gradually," opposition commander Mohammad Atta said by satellite telephone from the frontline.
"Once Mazar is captured, the other provinces of the north - Balkh, Samangan, Faryab and lastly Kunduz - with fall very quickly in the coming weeks," he added.
Rumsfeld said in Washington that the frontlines north of Kabul had been largely spared U.S. bombing because of a lack of precise targeting information.
"I suspect that in the period ahead that might not be a safe place to be," Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news conference.
The United States has demanded bin Laden's unconditional extradition to stand trial in connection with a string of terrorist attacks and the destruction of his training camps in Afghanistan as a condition for calling off the bombing.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell met Tuesday with Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf in an effort to consolidate Islamabad's support for the campaign.
After their talks, Musharraf reiterated Islamabad's backing for the campaign, saying, "We will certainly carry on cooperating as long as the operation lasts."
But he told a press conference Pakistan believed the campaign should be "short and targeted."
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