US jets pound Kabul

US jets targeted the heart of Afghanistan’s capital today, pounding a district that housed a Taliban tank unit and other military installations.

Northern Alliance opposition forces were reported to be fighting hard for a strategic Taliban-held city.

In Washington, defence sources said US special forces were now in place aboard the USS Kitty Hawk in the Indian Ocean - ready for any search-and-destroy missions ordered against Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies.

Today’s air strikes opened before dawn in Kabul, with explosions that rocked central neighbourhoods around the presidential palace and elsewhere.

Taliban information ministry officials said the strikes were hitting around the city’s Shash Tarak district, near the long-abandoned US Embassy and home to a Taliban tank unit. The defence ministry and a Taliban garrison also are in the area.

Flames rose from the airport north of the city.

Yesterday, US pilots struck a fuel depot near the airport, sending black smoke billowing over Kabul.

In Kandahar, the Taliban’s headquarters in southern Afghanistan, jets struck military targets throughout the city, Taliban officials reported.

Residents said that Taliban fighters in the city were handing out weapons to civilians.

New strikes were also reported in the southern city of Jalalabad, targeting the airport and surrounding area.

US President George Bush ordered the air strikes, which began on October 7, after the Taliban repeatedly refused to hand over bin Laden, chief suspect in last month’s terrorist attacks in the United States.

In California, Bush told a flag-waving crowd that American air strikes, now in their 12th day, were "paving the way for friendly troops on the ground".

It was Bush’s clearest suggestion yet that military officials were taking Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance into account as they lay out the campaign.

Opposition forces have been locked in combat for days in what US defence officials have described as a seesaw battle for Mazar-e-Sharif, the major city of the north.

A Taliban information ministry official in Kabul, Abdul Hanan Himat, acknowledged the Taliban had lost control of some areas around Mazar-e-Sharif but insisted the Islamic regime’s forces had pushed its enemy back during one battle to the south.

Afghanistan’s opposition forces are an alliance made up largely of minority ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks.

Control of Mazar-e-Sharif would allow them to consolidate supply lines along the borders with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, from which they obtain weapons.

In Washington, officials said US special forces units themselves were now poised to join the battle on the ground, if called for.

Special operations forces were put aboard the USS Kitty Hawk several days ago.

The officials stressed that did not necessarily mean the troops were about to enter combat.

In north western Pakistan, a militant Muslim leader said that pro-Taliban groups there were ready to offer tens of thousands of volunteers to help the Taliban if US ground troops joined the fight.

"The day American troops land on the soil of Afghanistan, our youths are fully trained, and their minds and their hearts are filled with the feelings of holy war," said Maulana Samiul Haq, president of the Afghan Defence Council, a coalition of 35 pro-Taliban groups.

With the fight escalating, international aid officials based in Pakistan appealed for a break in the bombing so relief groups could rush food to desperate Afghan civilians before winter snows close roads next month.

"Time’s almost run out," Barbara Stocking of Oxfam International said.

In Washington, the UN World Food Programme said the Taliban militia have seized two warehouses in Kabul and Kandahar that contained nearly 7,000 tonnes of donated wheat - more than half the amount the WFP had in Afghanistan.