Associated Press

Residents look for their belongings amid the rubble of their destroyed house in Kabul Wednesday. U.S. jets targeted the heart of Afghanistan's capital yesterday, pounding a district that housed a Taliban tank unit and other military installations.

Friday October 19, 2001

KABUL, Afghanistan - American jets bombarded the center of the Afghan capital yesterday, and residents said a strike that hit homes killed at least five civilians - including a 16-year-old girl and four in one family who lived near a Taliban tank unit.

In southern Afghanistan, the Taliban headquarters of Kandahar came under attack dozens of times, residents said. And planes struck a small town outside the southern city where the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, had preached two days before.

With the air campaign in its 12th day came the first report that the bombing had killed a prominent figure in Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. A London-based Islamic group said an Egyptian who was a veteran al-Qaida fighter died in a U.S. strike on Sunday.

Alongside missiles and bombs, U.S. forces have been bombarding Afghanistan with radio broadcasts and leaflets urging surrender. Defense Minister Donald H.

Rumsfeld said at the Pentagon that those operations had borne some fruit, with some Taliban defecting to the opposition.

Strikes on the capital appeared targeted against a Taliban tank unit and other military installations near the city center yesterday. However, one bomb devastated two homes in the Quilazaman Khan neighborhood, killing the four family members, according to neighbors.

A 16-year-old girl was also killed when another bomb exploded in the Microryan housing complex about a half mile away, residents said. Late yesterday, two strong detonations shook buildings in the once-fashionable Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood.

There was no immediate confirmation of the number of deaths. The United States has expressed regret for civilian casualties, insisting that it only targets bin Laden and his Taliban allies.

Taliban officials said at least 12 people were killed and 20 injured during the day of strikes on Kandahar - a claim that could not be independently verified. Planes also targeted Arghandab, a small town about 12 miles to the northwest, witnesses said. Taliban sources claimed there were no military targets there, but Mullah Omar preached there Tuesday.

The London-based Islamic Observation Center reported yesterday that a U.S. strike near Jalalabad on Sunday killed an Egyptian veteran with al-Qaida, known as Abu Baseer al-Masri, and injured two of his colleagues.

Afghan sources in Islamabad, Pakistan, said al-Masri had been in Afghanistan for about 10 years and was close to bin Laden's chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri.

Still, both bin Laden and Mullah Omar were alive, said the Taliban ambassador to neighboring Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef. He said he had met recently with bin Laden and "he is fine."

Rejecting reports of Taliban defections, Zaeef told reporters in the Pakistani border town Chaman that Taliban morale was high. "Until there is one Talib alive in Afghanistan, America cannot defeat us," he said. "Our morale are high and we will never bow to unjust demands of any power."

Behind opposition lines about 40 miles north of Kabul, the Afghan opposition alliance presented what it said were 10 Taliban defectors to foreign reporters. They claimed morale among Taliban fighters was low.

"They say their morale is high but it isn't. Fighters are running away to Pakistan or Iran, or joining the (northern alliance)," said 30-year-old Abdul Ghafur, who defected four days ago and who held a machine gun in his hands as he spoke.

In Islamabad, Pakistan, aid groups, meanwhile, complained that looting by the Taliban and other armed bands was hampering desperately needed relief operations for Afghan civilians.

Medicines sans Frontieres shut down medical operations in Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif yesterday after its offices there were sacked.

The programs together had helped treat the ill and feed children in six Afghan provinces, according to a spokesman for the group, Morten Rostrup.

In Kabul, Taliban officials returned one of two U.N. World Food Program grain warehouses that had been commandeered earlier in the week at gunpoint - but there was no word on the warehouse still in Taliban hands.