Posted on 10/31/2001 9:34:22 AM PST by SunStar
Wednesday October 31 1:13 PM ET
By Altaf Hussein
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - U.S. planes carpet-bombed Taliban front lines north of Kabul on Wednesday and attacked the Muslim militia's powerbase of Kandahar in southeast Afghanistan, hitting a clinic, witnesses said.
In a pre-dawn strike a U.S. jet hit a Red Crescent dispensary in Kandahar killing 11 people, a doctor told foreign reporters visiting the city under Taliban escort. Reporters were not shown bodies.
In the north, a B-52 bomber sent up a wall of orange flame and clouds of dust along Taliban positions overlooking opposition-held Bagram airbase north of the capital Kabul.
It was one of the heaviest raids of the campaign in the area where the Taliban fighters are dug in facing the opposition Northern Alliance.
A Reuters photographer watched the silver eight-engine aircraft make two raids, causing multiple explosions.
The intensified attacks followed opposition calls for the United States to hit the Taliban harder to clear the way for an opposition push toward Kabul. A small number of U.S. soldiers are on the ground in northern Afghanistan to help coordinate the raids.
Ahmad Ziah Masood, brother of former northern military leader Ahmad Shah Masood who was assassinated last month, said he hoped the opposition offensive would start within five days.
"Every day the Americans are bombing the front line and now we should do something," he told Reuters.
BIN LADEN HIDING
He said he believed Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center in which nearly 5,000 died, was hiding in mountains north of Kandahar.
In Kandahar, stronghold of Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, foreign reporters were taken to the site of an attack.
"The bombs fell at 4.30 this morning," Doctor Obaidullah told the reporters taken to the clinic in the Dagh Pul suburb of Kandahar.
Obaidullah, his head, right hand and left leg in bandages from wounds he said he had sustained in the raid, said 11 people -- including patients and staff at the clinic -- were killed and six wounded in the bombing.
Reporters heard U.S. planes drop at least one bomb on the city at about 4.30 a.m. The reports of casualties could not be independently verified.
Dozens of people gathered at the clinic in a city that has been the target of almost daily U.S bombing in Washington's "war on terror," aimed at flushing out Saudi-born bin Laden and punishing the Taliban for harboring him.
"Down with Bush," "Down with America," the crowd shouted.
"These foreigners are sons of pigs," shouted one man in the crowd as the journalists toured the city, which bore the scars of weeks of bombing.
The Taliban, lightly-armed guerrillas who can melt into Afghanistan's rugged landscape, have not collapsed under three weeks of U.S. aerial onslaught and none of the Pashtun tribes that make up the militia have defected.
Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil was in defiant mood when he met the foreign reporters in Kandahar late on Wednesday. He challenged President Bush and Britain's Tony Blair to fight a dual with Kalashnikov rifles with Mullah Omar.
He denied media reports of a rift in the movement.
BIG BOMB
The blast from the raid on Kandahar rattled windows in the suburbs and shook the ground.
"It was huge, the whole building was shaking," said a Reuters reporter of the raid.
"They are targeting the civilian population," said resident Mohammad Hashim.
"Can someone tell us if they are targeting Arab positions?" he added, referring to the foreign fighters in bin Laden's al Qaeda network who man the front lines at many Taliban positions. The include many Arabs, but also Pakistanis and Chechens.
"Have they targeted Taliban positions so far?"
In Islamabad, Taliban ambassador Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef said 1,500 people had been killed since the United States launched its raids 25 days ago. Washington says casualty figures have been exaggerated.
Despite the bombing many shops in Kandahar stayed open. Men with the long beards mandated by the Taliban, under their vision of a 1,300-year-old Islamic Utopia, were shopping, accompanying women who swept through the streets enveloped in the head-to-toe burqa veils.
Electronics stores and mechanics' workshops were doing business, and fruit stalls were laden with apples, pomegranates, grapes and bananas imported from neighboring Pakistan.
These guys are going to have to learn how to defame better than this. Are they trying to make us giggle?
Ummm . . . if we were targeting the civilian population, there wouldn't be a civilian population by now.
The only eight engin aircraft, known to all save the socalled reporter is the B-52 bomber. All of which are painted in dark green camo. They have to get their disinformation right inorder to be accepted.
I'd say so. Oink! Oink!
Correct. I did not write the headline...
I especially like the silver eight-engine plane part..........
BUF hasnt flown silver since the days of trial flights.........
Propaganda
You seem to be saying this strike was precious guided munitions. Assuming the pic is related to the drop, it was looks like simple 500 lb. gravity drop. Simple but extremely brutal.
Lots of disputes here about carpet bombing vs bombing bombing... Seems to me that one B-52 dropping a load is on a similar scale to WWII carpet bombing. The distiction that carpet bombing is not aimed seems bogus too. They don't just randomly pick a drop point, they fly over the target area and drop the load (assume a bombadier still sights the location).
The story is that a British governor of Afghanistan shut down a jihad in the 19th Century using bullets dipped in pork products.
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