US PLANES launched their fiercest strikes so far on the Taleban frontline in Afghanistan on Wednesday. The United Nations meanwhile said that US bombs have struck a mosque in a military compound and a nearby village during raids on the western city of Herat this week, adding to a growing catalogue of bombing blunders.
The revelation came as refugees arriving in southwestern Pakistan reported that 18 days of air strikes had reduced the Taleban's main base in Kandahar to a bombed-out ghost town and provided further evidence that scores of civilians have been killed.
The Taleban said they were arming villagers to resist retaliatory US ground attacks and vowed to fight to the last man.
In Washington, the FBI said there was still a distinct possibility of new attacks on the United States, more than six weeks after hijackers slammed airliners into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon near Washington.
But it was the fear of anthrax, a potent germ warfare weapon contained in contaminated letters, that preoccupied Americans even more than news from the Afghan front. Three people have died and nine others have been infected.
At the same time, US President George W. Bush made it clear the military campaign would continue as long as chief terror suspect Osama Ben Laden roams free.
“We're resolved. We are strong. We're determined. We're patient. And this nation is going to do whatever it takes,” Bush said.
In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the staunchest US ally in the campaign, indicated there was no guarantee of a speedy end, vowing to bring Ben Laden to justice for the Sept. 11 attacks, however long it takes.
UN spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker said independent reports from the Afghan village of Herat indicated the mosque hit by US bombs was in the same military compound as a military hospital which was bombed on Monday night.
The village, located 500 metres to 1,000 metres from the military compound, was hit with cluster bombs — fist-sized anti-personnel and armour penetrating explosives designed to scatter across an area.
“On the same night or morning (as the mosque and hospital were bombed), a village was also hit, located between the military camp and the city of Herat,” Bunker said.
She said there were no reports of casualties, but villagers had requested assistance from demining agencies to clear the area of the cluster bombs.
The UN revelation came a day after the US admitted that bombs had gone astray over the weekend in Herat and over Kabul, where witnesses said at least 10 people died Sunday in a residential neighbourhood.
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said the US could not be sure of the impact of the mishaps but insisted attacks were carefully targeted on Taleban military infrastructure or Ben Laden's Al Qaeda network.
“We take extraordinary care on the targeting process,” she said. “There is unintended damage. There is collateral damage. Thus far, it has been extremely limited from what we've seen.”
Refugees arriving in Pakistan suggested otherwise. Several recounted how 20 people, including nine children, had been killed as they tried to flee an attack on the southern Afghan town of Tirin Kot on a tractor and trailer.
One survivor, Abdul Maroof, 28, said injured people were left screaming in vain for help after the tractor was bombed on a remote rural road.
Refugees from the western city of Herat who travelled for six days to get to the eastern border with Pakistan, told of horrifying destruction along the main road to Kandahar.
“Kandahar was completely destroyed. Everything has turned into piles of stones. Thousands more people are on their way here,” said refugee Abdul Nabi after his arrival at a makeshift refugee camp here.
He said he had seen two groups of 13 and 15 corpses, which he believed were the remains of civilians, near bombed out trucks on the road between Heart and Kandahar.
The Taleban said a village in the mountains west of Tirin Kot had been bombed in the early hours of the morning, killing 12 people less than 24 hours after more than 50 died in Chakoor Kariz, near Kandahar.
Neither alleged attack has been independently verified but Arabic news station Al Jazeera has broadcast pictures of people from Chakoor Kariz being treated in hospital.
The United States has dismissed Taleban claims that more than 1,000 civilians have died as ridiculously overblown.
But reports of civilian casualties have fuelled anti-American protests across the Islamic world and provoked expressions of concern from two key US allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Quantifying the impact of the bombing is virtually impossible, given the absence of independent sources in most parts of Afghanistan.
But in Kabul alone the deaths of at least 25 civilians have been confirmed either by UN officials or by witnesses speaking directly to AFP, and bombing has been more intense in Kandahar, a city of 200,000 people before the crisis.
No evidence to link Ben Laden to anthrax
Although no hard evidence has emerged linking the anthrax outbreak to Ben Laden, US officials were operating under the suspicion it was tied to groups that carried out the September attacks.
US Postmaster General John Potter warned there was no guarantee that US mail was safe after traces of anthrax were found in an off-site White House mail screening centre. He told Americans to wash their hands after handling mail.
Preliminary tests of some 120 workers at White House mail facilities showed none had been exposed to anthrax, but spokesman Ari Fleischer said, “Everyone needs to be alert because we're a nation that's at war.”
Surgeon General David Satcher, the top US health official, said, “We've never been through a bioterrorist attack before ... I don't think yet we're beyond our capability (to cope), but I think we have to continue to strengthen that capability.”
Germany's Bayer AG, maker of Cipro, the most prominent antibiotic for treating anthrax, agreed to supply the US government with up to 300 million tablets of the anti-anthrax antibiotic at discounted price, the company said Wednesday.
Under the terms of the agreement valued at $95 million, the US government will pay 95 cents per tablet, for a total initial order of 100 million tablets compared to a previously discounted price of $1.77 per tablet paid by the federal government, Bayer said.
Cipro has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for respiratory anthrax, the most lethal form of the disease. But a bottle of the medicine containing 60 pills normally sells for $300 in the United States, which can limit its accessibility for those exposed to the deadly germ.
So far 12 people have been confirmed infected with anthrax, three of whom died from the dangerous inhaled form. Two more Washington postal workers were seriously ill in a hospital with inhalation anthrax and others were being treated for suspected anthrax.
Some three dozen have been exposed to the disease without contracting it, including 28 US Senate staff members who tested positive for exposure after an anthrax-laced letter was sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office.
“There are no guarantees that mail is safe,” Potter said in a TV interview. “That's why we're asking people to handle mail very carefully.”
“We think that the chances are very very slim. But people should do things that are safe and when they handle mail, they should wash their hands.”
The Postal Service was giving employees masks to protect against airborne spores and was introducing gloves, he said.
Referring to the attack that levelled the World Trade Centre, he said, “We lost the firefighters and police officers up in New York and now the Postal Service people are on the front line in this war.”
More attacks possible
FBI Director Robert Mueller said there more attacks on the United States were possible.
“I must tell you that the threat level remains very high — more attempts and possible attacks are a distinct possibility,” Mueller told the US Conference of Mayors.
The US House of Representatives passed and sent to the Senate for final congressional approval a broad bill for increased law enforcement authority to wiretap suspected terrorists, share intelligence information about them, track their Internet movements and crack down on money laundering.
On the Afghan front near opposition-held Jabal-Us-Saraj, waves of aircraft roared over Taleban trenches facing the Northern Alliance a few kilometers north of Kabul and fired at Taleban targets after a night of heavy bombing.
The raids were the heaviest on the Taleban front line since they began on Sunday.
Watching from a roof, opposition commander Abdul Mahfus said the missiles had landed near four Taleban strongholds facing the strategic opposition-held airport of Bagram.
In Gulbahar, not far from the front line, hundreds gathered to watch the traditional sport of buzkashi. The US-led strikes made the game possible, participants said.
“Earlier this would have been impossible for us to do, because the Taleban could have bombed us, but now we are able and that makes us extremely happy,” said Nur Habib, his burly, bearded face covered in sweat and dust as scrums of horses and riders wielding whips leaned down to snatch the calf's carcass.
In northern Afghanistan, Commander Mohammad Atta said his opposition forces south of Mazar-i-Sharif, had mounted an offensive towards the district of Keshendeh during the night.
He said US air attacks on enemy lines had enabled his men to win control of four villages in fighting which left between 70 and 80 Taleban troops dead and 150 captured. But opposition commanders at the front north of Kabul were less upbeat, saying the US bombing was insufficient to help their outnumbered and underequipped fighters advance.
The opposition Northern Alliance, which says it has teams of US special forces among its ranks, has been fighting the Taliban for years and hopes to take Mazar-i-Sharif to free supply routes leading to Kabul.
Meanwhile, some 1,000 Afghan tribal and religious leaders met in Pakistan with supporters of their exiled king to discuss an interim government to take over if the militia is ousted.
Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani, the royalist head of the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan (NIFA), said 87-year-old King Mohammed Zahir Shah favoured the deployment of UN peacekeepers from Muslim countries after the fighting.
Gailani said there should be a “broad-based” government based on Islamic beliefs.
He said that moderate Taleban leaders could join the administration if they abandoned the regime, an idea likely to be opposed by many Northern Alliance commanders and their Indian and Russian backers.
In Washington defence officials said US warplanes were sharply increasing strikes against Taleban troops and supply depots in a concerted drive to choke off their power base.
“The winter will be harder on the Taleban than it will be on us. If troops can't get bullets, fuel or food, what can they do?” one of the officials told Reuters in the third week of the US-led air campaign on the Central Asian nation.
But Taleban leaders breathed defiance, saying they were arming villagers to resist US ground attacks. They vowed to fight to the last man.
“Now our decision is to form armed groups in villages and all provinces of Afghanistan to confront the United States and its friends in a possible commando operation,” Education Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi told Reuters Television in Kabul.
If American troops entered Afghanistan, they would suffer huge casualties, Muttaqi warned.
“Their casualties will be higher than the Russians because Americans are people of (more) pleasure and comfort,” he said.
Moscow lost some 17,000 troops in its Afghan war between 1979 and 1989.
“As long as one Muslim Afghan is alive he will not surrender to America,” he said.
In London, Blair assured Britons the US-led military mission against bin Laden would succeed. “We will get him in the end,” he said.
In the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar, Sayed Ahmad Gailani, a religious leader hosting a major anti-Taleban strategy session, told 800 exiles the military campaign was killing innocent civilians when what Afghanistan needed was reconstruction after two decades of devastating civil war.
“Efforts should be made to stop the military operations and start work on the reconstruction of the country as early as possible,” Gailani said in Pashto, the language of the country's dominate ethnic group, to which the Taliban belong.
He urged Taleban dissidents to switch sides and organisers said recent turncoats were at the meeting.
In other developments:
— US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Wednesday he hopes the anti-terrorism war in Afghanistan can be concluded quickly but the administration is prepared to keep up the fight during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan if necessary.
NATO-led troops believe they have disrupted a “terrorist” organisation in Bosnia. A local source said two recently arrested suspects were apparently members of Algerian and Egyptian “terrorist” organisations and a third suspect was believed to have had a relative working for the US Embassy.
— In Lahore, Pakistan, the Harakat ul-Mujahedeen, a radical group linked to Al Qaeda of Ben Laden, announced that 22 of its fighters were killed Tuesday in an American attack on Kabul. Muzamal Shah, a leader of the group, said the victims had travelled to Afghanistan to help the Taleban “devise a plan for fighting against America.” They were in a meeting at a house in Kabul when a bomb hit.
Pakistani border guards at Torkham refused Wednesday to allow 11 of the bodies to be brought into Pakistan for burial. Sources close to the Harakat ul-Mujahedeen said the bodies were smuggled later into Pakistan.