- KABUL/JALALABAD, Afghanistan
- Afghanistan's ruling Taliban said Sunday that U.S. air raids had killed
scores of civilians but they would still not be bullied into handing over
Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden.
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- As Taliban officials showed reporters a village in the
east of the country where they said up to 200 civilians had been killed
in bombing raids last week, they said an unspecified number had died in
a similar misdirected attack west of the capital before dawn.
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- Waves of U.S. jets struck Kabul and three other cities
for the seventh straight night Saturday as the United States continued
its efforts to flush out Osama bin Laden and weaken his Taliban protectors.
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- One of the main targets was Jalalabad, long surrounded
by militant training camps including some used by bin Laden's al Qaeda
network.
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- Taliban officials took a group of international reporters
from Pakistan to Khorum village near Jalalabad where they said up to 200
people may have been killed in a bomb strike last week.
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- Villagers were still digging through the rubble for bodies
Sunday.
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- ``I lost my four daughters, my son and my wife in this
attack,'' said a distraught villager, Toray, who was out of his house when
the attack came.
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- He held up a piece of shrapnel he said he had recovered
from the flattened property. The words ``fin guided bomb'' were stenciled
on the metal.
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- ``We have brought you here to see the cruelty of the
Americans,'' Maulvi Atiqullah, director of the Jalalabad information department,
said earlier.
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- Taliban officials in Kabul said the few reporters remaining
in the capital could visit another site, west of the capital, where they
said civilians were killed in an overnight bomb raid.
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- U.S. ADMITS ONE BOMB WENT OFF COURSE
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- The United States has said only one of its bombs had
gone off course since the air raids began last week.
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- U.S. defense officials said a plane missed a helicopter
at Kabul airport and its 2,000-lb (900-kg) bomb blasted a residential neighborhood
a mile (1.6 km) away.
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- Despite the continuing raids and punishing toll -- which
Taliban officials say is now well over 300 -- reclusive leader Mullah Mohammad
Omar insisted again that bin Laden would never be handed over.
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- ``Our sin is that we have imposed an Islamic system in
our country and have given protection to a homeless Muslim, oppressed,
who cannot even find a place in any part of the world to sit for an hour,''
the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) reported Mullah Omar as saying
in a message.
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- ``You, the Muslims of the world who are watching with
your own eyes the American atrocities on Afghanistan, does your faith allow
you to sit silent or to support America,'' he added.
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- Bin Laden, chief suspect in the September 11 suicide
plane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and sheltered
by the Taliban, is hiding in a cave in the Afghan mountains with 300 commandos,
according to his son.
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- Britain's Sunday Mirror quoted bin Laden's 18-year-old
son Abdullah as saying in an interview in Peshawar, Pakistan that his father
disappeared with 60 trucks carrying satellite equipment on September 11.
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- ``America and Britain will never track down my father,''
he said. ``He has vanished into the landscape -- he is invisible.''
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- Bin Laden's al Qaeda group vowed to retaliate for the
attacks on Afghanistan and hit British and U.S. targets, threats Washington
dismissed as propaganda, but which Britain said were an admission of the
network's role in the attacks that left nearly 5,400 people dead in the
United States.
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- Al Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Bu Ghaith, in a statement
broadcast on Qatar's al-Jazeera satellite television, warned Americans
and Britons, especially Muslims, children and ``all those who oppose U.S.
policy'' not to ``ride planes or live in tall buildings.''
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- SLUGGISH ANTI-AIRCRAFT FIRE
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- Residents of the capital said the Taliban's anti-aircraft
fire had appeared sluggish Saturday night, suggesting the strikes may have
badly damaged its rudimentary radar equipment and anti-aircraft batteries.
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- Kabul telephone links with the rest of the world -- unreliable
at the best of times -- were further disrupted when a bomb severed links
to a microwave exchange in the east of the city, cutting 90 lines -- about
half the capital's network.
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- The airport was again the main target Saturday.
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- ``Two bombs landed on the airport,'' a witness said.
``There was a big fireball that lit up the sky.'' A column of smoke and
flames could be seen rising from the direction of the airport, he added.
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- Southern Kandahar, stronghold of the Taliban, was also
under intense attack and at least seven waves of strikes took place on
western Herat airport, Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) quoted Taliban sources
as saying.
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- ``We once again want to say that their (the U.S.) intention
is a war against Muslims and Afghans,'' Taliban Information Minister Mullah
Qudratullah Jamal told Reuters. ``Our jihad...will continue until the last
breath for the defense of our homeland and Islam.''
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- Under attack from outside Afghanistan's borders, the
Taliban said they had made some gains against their enemies within by recapturing
a district from the opposition Northern Alliance.
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- The area is in the central province of Bamiyan, site
of two giant centuries-old Buddhist statues which the purist Taliban destroyed
earlier this year on the grounds they were un-Islamic.
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- But senior Afghan opposition commander General Abdul
Rashid Dostum told Uzbek television Saturday that anti-Taliban forces were
preparing a ``fierce offensive'' against Mazar-i-Sharif, a northern Taliban-held
stronghold.
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- The Taliban control more than 90 percent of Afghanistan
and the Northern Alliance holds the remainder. The air raids have sparked
an exodus of people from cities -- many heading toward Pakistan, with belongings
piled hastily onto donkeys and camels.
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