Afghanistan | Sunday
FOREIGN journalists invited to view the devastation wrought by the US bombing of Afghanistan arrived in Jalalabad on Sunday to find Taliban fighters dancing to the sound of incoming missiles.
A heavily guarded convoy, bringing the first journalists allowed into Taliban-controlled territory since US-led forces began their military campaign in Afghanistan a week ago, reached this eastern Afghan city about midnight (1930 GMT Saturday) in the middle of a US air strike.
Three loud explosions rocked the city, one of them close enough to rattle the windows of the ”White Mountain Hotel,” where the 19 journalists were being put up prior to visiting a village where the Taliban claim at least 160 people were killed in a US aerial attack.
While most of the reporters flinched at the blasts, armed Taliban guards outside the hotel laughed dismissively in the direction of the explosions and even danced with each other in a display of bravado.
The journalists were given a warm welcome in Jalalabad by Atiq Ullah Qazi, a representative for the Taliban foreign ministry.
”In the morning, we will show you the destruction and damage caused by the cruel attacks of the United States,” Qazi said. ”They want to capture Afghanistan.”
The Taliban say they have recovered 160 mutilated bodies from Kadam village, some 40 kilometres west of Jalalabad, after it was completely destroyed by US bombs on Wednesday night.
There has been no independent confirmation of the toll, although the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite channel on Saturday broadcast images of the destruction in the village.
The United States has expressed regret for the loss of any innocent lives, while angrily rejecting Taliban accusations that it is deliberately targetting civilians.
The journalists entered Afghanistan via the Torkham border crossing near the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar.
On the Afghan side, Taliban fighters, many of them teenagers, gave no indication of being cowed by seven days of sustained aerial bombardment.
”We are ready for jihad (holy war) if US troops enter our territory,” said one 18-year-old with a rocket launcher slung over his shoulders. ”We will cut them to pieces.”
Manned Taliban bunkers were dotted along the 100-kilometer route from Torkham to Jalalabad, but the road was otherwise deserted, with no sign of any refugees heading for the Pakistan border.
Progress was slow and by the time the convoy reached Jalalabad, darkness had fallen and the city was blacked out, as it has been every night since the beginning of the air strikes, which have made the airport and other military installations one of their prime targets.
Just before entering the city, the convoy halted as the Taliban guards radioed ahead to secure passwords needed to move through the outer checkpoints.
Foreign journalists, with the exception of Al-Jazeera crews, were forced to leave Taliban-controlled Afghanistan shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, blamed on the Taliban’s long-term ”guest” Osama bin Laden.
Since then foreign reporters have been barred from entering, and several who tried to sneak across the Pakistan border have been arrested and threatened with spying charges. In the meantime, US jets raided the southern Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in daytime raids on Sunday morning after a night of heavy bombings targeting military bases and the airport, residents said.
”The bombing has started again,” a resident contacted by phone told AFP. He said the latest US attacks had started around 0530 GMT.
A senior Taliban military official, who did not want to be identified, told AFP that US forces had struck the militia’s military base at Qeshla Jadeed, about four kilometres from the centre of Kandahar.
He did not know if any troops had been at the base when it was hit.
The city’s airport was again pounded and US warplanes had also struck targets in the surrounding mountains, he added.
In Kabul, the airport, a defunct television transmitter on a hill near the centre of the city which is known as tv mountain, and the Qargha area in the west of the city were hit.
Targets in Herat, the main city of western Afghanistan, Jalalabad in the east and the strategic northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif, which opposition forces are attempting to reclaim, were also struck, the officer said.
The officer could not provide specific details of where civilians had been killed but insisted that there had been large numbers of fatalities in both the Jalalabad and Kandahar areas because of US attempts to target the training camps of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.
”In the countryside the scale of casualties is very high,” he said. ”It seems that the Americans believe every village in the mountains is a training camp.”
Arab television network Al-Jazeera on Sunday broadcast pictures of the bombed-out village of Kadam, near Jalalabad. The Taliban claims at least 160 people died when the village and nearby caves were attacked by US warplanes last week.
A senior Taliban military official said earlier that US forces had struck the militia’s military base at Qeshla Jadeed, about four kilometres from the centre of Kandahar, overnight.
He did not know if any troops had been at the base when it was hit.
The city’s airport was again pounded and US warplanes had also struck targets in the surrounding mountains, the officer added. -Sapa-AFP