Kabul | Monday
HEAVY fighting flared on Monday for a second day close to the Taliban’s southern bastion of Kandahar as tribal forces backed by intense US air raids tried to storm the airport, anti-Taliban officials said.
Afghanistan’s diehard Taliban fighters were on notice to surrender or die as the Americans and their Afghan allies geared up to flush the hardline Islamic militia out of the last major city under their control.
Tribal militias loyal to two Pashtun elders fought to within a kilometre of the airport, some 20 kilometres to the south of the city centre, as US aircraft harried the most stubborn Taliban resistance.
“Because of the US bombardment, they (the Taliban) cannot come close to our people,” said Ahmad Karzai, brother of former deputy foreign minister Hamid Karzai who is leading one tribal group outside Kandahar.
The anti-Taliban forces had crossed a key bridge three kilometres from their objective and expected to take the airport later on Monday, he said.
“Kandahar airport is very important. From there we can move to other districts and take up more positions,” he said.
A Marine representative said the battle appeared to be building to a “culmination” as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signalled a potentially dangerous role for US forces based in the desert south of Kandahar.
He said the Taliban, outnumbering their local foes and stiffened by Pakistani, Arab, Chechen and Chinese fighters, were expected put up a fight in their spiritual and ethnic capital.
“It will take some reinforcements. It will take some assistance from the air,” Rumsfeld told US television on Sunday.
He did not comment on the possibility of US ground troops taking part in combat but said the conflict was entering a perilous phase and suggested that American troops could be killed or captured.
“The noose is tightening but the remaining task is a particularly dirty and unpleasant one,” Rumsfeld said.
“If they don’t surrender, they will be killed.”
US officials said there were 1 500-2 000 American troops in Afghanistan, including more than 1 000 Marines at a desert airstrip around southwest of Kandahar.
Extra Cobra helicopter gunships, armed with lethal rockets, guided missiles and 20 millimetre cannons, arrived on Sunday, nearly doubling the number of attack and support choppers on hand.
More light armoured vehicles were flown in.
Major James Higgins, a Marine intelligence officer, said the Taliban were still in control of Kandahar but the battle “seems to be reaching a culmination point of some type”.
“You have a lot of forces at play — opposition groups coming from the north down, from the southeast up, and us coming potentially from where we are,” he said.
Anti-Taliban forces of the former governor of Kandahar province Gul Agha, the second Pashtun tribal leader advancing towards the airport, claimed on Sunday to have killed 12 Arab fighters during fierce combat.
An aide to the ex-governor said at least 11 other Taliban fighters had been wounded in the firefight at Urgustan bridge, about three kilometres from the airfield.
With continued support from US aircraft, which destroyed three Taliban bunkers on Sunday, he said the airport would be captured “very soon”.
A military source said the Taliban were digging in at Kandahar and moving forces and weapons from Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province 80 miles to the west.
Officials of the Taliban, which once controlled 90% of Afghanistan but is now reduced to a few provinces in the southern dust bowl, said they would go down fighting rather than surrender to the “infidels”.
US forces were also tasked with cutting Taliban supply lines and potential escape routes for Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, who are accused of masterminding the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Officials said they believed bin Laden and his lieutenants were hiding out either in the mountains around Kandahar or in an elaborate complex of caves in eastern Afghanistan near the city of Jalalabad.
In addition to Kandahar, US planes have been hammering the Tora Bora cave complex south of Jalalabad. US and British elite special forces troops were reportedly preparing to storm bin Laden’s suspected mountain lairs.
With the United States intensifying the airstrikes in Afghanistan that it launched on October 7, reports of new civilian deaths have mounted.
Three quarters of the city’s population is thought to have fled since the start of the bombing campaign.
Two civilian deaths were reported by the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) on Monday. Their deaths bring to 58 the number of non-combatants killed in the past three days, according to AIP and witnesses crossing into Pakistan.
There has been no independent confirmation of any of the civilian deaths. – AFP