US warplanes resumed attacks on Kabul Wednesday after Washington admitted fresh bombing errors and evidence mounted that scores of civilians have died in the campaign against Afghanistan's Taliban regime.
US defence officials in Washington admitted that bombs had gone astray over the weekend in Herat, where the UN said a military hospital had been struck, and over Kabul at the weekend, where witnesses have said at least 10 people died in a residential neighbourhood.
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said the US could not be sure of the impact of the mishaps but insisted that attacks were carefully targeted on Taliban military infrastructure or sites linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
"We take extraordinary care on the targeting process," she said. "Our targets are military.
"There is unintended damage. There is collateral damage. Thus far, it has been extremely limited from what we've seen."
The UN, a rare source of information about the impact of the bombing through its Afghan workers, late Tuesday reported that Taliban troops were moving into residential areas of Kabul, increasing the risk of accidents.
Refugees who arrived in Pakistan on Tuesday said that 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. Another one of those who made it to the Pakistani border, Faizul Mohammad, said he had lost his foot in the attack.
Taliban officials have reported at least two previous incidents similar to the one recounted by the refugees and claim more than 1,000 civilians have died since the airstrikes began on October 7. The Taliban has said both a military and a civilian hospital were bombed in Herat.
The US and has dismissed the Taliban's figures as ridiculously overblown and dismissed many reported incidents as lies.
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 there is evidence to suggest scores of people have died.
In Kabul alone, the deaths of at least 25 civilians have been confirmed either by UN officials or by witnesses speaking directly to AFP.
The bombing of the southern city of Kandahar, which was home to 200,000 people before the crisis, has been much fiercer than in Kabul but Taliban claims of deaths there have been impossible to confirm.
The western city of Herat and Jalalabad, near the eastern border with Pakistan, have also been repeatedly bombed, and there has is no sign of a let-up any time soon.
A senior Pentagon official said Tuesday that the campaign, which has succeeded in crippling Taliban air defences, was unlikely to be over before winter sets in around the middle of next month.
"If it was a perfect world, we'd like to wrap this up before the bad weather moved in," said Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem. But he added: "We don't think that that's realistic."
US warplanes dropped at least nine bombs on Kabul in overnight raids which underlined the feeble state of the Taliban's anti-aircraft guns. By the time a final pre-dawn attack was mounted, it appeared that only a solitary gun was firing.
Meanwhile, it emerged that the US strikes on Kabul on Monday had killed 35 members of a Pakistani militant group with alleged links to terrorism.
The members of the Harakat ul-Mujahedin were killed when a US bomb struck the house they were staying at, according to a Pakistani cleric, Mufti Jamal.
He said the men were all Pakistanis who were in Kabul to fight alongside the Taliban.
Harakat is one of more than a dozen Pakistani Islamic militant groups fighting to oust Indian forces from the disputed state of Kashmir.
It has claimed credit for a number of attacks on Indian troops in Kashmir and is known to train its forces in Afghanistan. Its accounts were frozen by Pakistani authorities on September 24 after the group appeared on a US terrorism blacklist.
The men were staying in a house in Darul Aman, to the south of Kabul, near a Taliban military base that was bombed Tuesday. The base in the area is known to Kabul residents as a centre for foreign, mostly Arab, militants fighting alongside the Taliban.
US raids on Tuesday included heavy attacks on Taliban frontline positions in northern Afghanistan, providing cover for a ground offensive by the Northern Alliance opposition aimed at securing control of the strategically important northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif.
( China Daily 10/24/2001)
