WASHINGTON/KABUL (REUTERS) — The United States and Britain unleashed waves of bombing and missile strikes on Afghanistan Sunday to cripple the armed forces of its Taliban rulers and drive out of caves and into the open those believed responsible for suicide plane attacks on America.
Kabul residents reported several dead in the Afghan capital alone after the night raids throughout the nation.
President Bush said Afghanistan’s radical Islamic rulers were paying the price for supporting terrorism and sheltering Osama bin Laden, accused of directing the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon near Washington that killed about 5,600 people.
As dawn broke in Kabul, residents emerged nervously from their homes.
“Only God knows what has happened,” said one resident. “I am leaving. I will sleep under the sky rather than stay in the city for another night.”
“People have seen some bodies from the attacks,” other witnesses told Reuters. “There are several deaths.”
Bush said operation “Enduring Freedom” was initially designed to “disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime and its ruler, Mullah Mohammad Omar.”
“Initially the terrorists may burrow deeper into caves and other entrenched hiding places. Our military action is … to drive them out and bring them to justice,” Bush said.
In a stick-and-carrot strategy, U.S. planes later dropped leaflets calling on the Taliban to end their resistance as well as food supplies to the population of about 24 million.
Witnesses told Reuters the first planes roared over Kabul, at around 9:20 p.m. (12:20 p.m. EDT) Sunday, soon after a nightly curfew took effect, and lit up the night sky with the flash of exploding bombs and missiles.
Two more waves followed as the world’s most modern military launched Tomahawk cruise missiles, high-altitude bombers and submarine-launched missiles against one of the world’s least developed countries.
One big blast struck near the defense ministry, south of the presidential palace. Electricity to the city was cut and the only radio station went off the air.
At a Pentagon briefing, officials said 15 bombers, 25 strike aircraft and 50 cruise missiles took part in the first wave of attacks, including B-1, B-2 and B-52 bombers. British submarines launched cruise missiles.
BIN LADEN SURVIVES
The Taliban ambassador to Pakistan said bin Laden and Mullah Omar both survived the three waves of attacks which went on for nearly seven hours.
In his first verified statement since last month’s attacks, a videotape of bin Laden with an AK-47 rifle by his side was broadcast by an Arab television station in Qatar. The tape had apparently been prepared in advance for release after a U.S. attack. In it, bin Laden praised the loss of life in the United States and described Bush as “head of the infidels.”
“Every Muslim must rise to defend his religion,” bin Laden said in comments clearly designed to arouse Muslims worldwide.
With the bombings underway 26 days after the suicide plane attacks, the United States warned its citizens abroad to take extra precautions, and the FBI told law enforcement agencies at home to operate at the highest possible state of alert to guard against “any act of terrorism.”
The same precautions were ordered in other world capitals.
AIM TO STRENGTHEN AFGHAN OPPOSITION
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the U.S. aim was to strengthen opposition forces that have been fighting the Taliban, which controls about 90 percent of the country.
“I’m disinclined to talk about things that are in process,” said Rumsfeld when asked if the United States had special operations or other troops now operating in Afghanistan.
“If we had significant numbers of U.S. military on the ground, it would have been known by now.”
Shortly after the air strikes began, the opposition forces launched a heavy barrage of shelling on Taliban positions about 40 miles north of Kabul.
Last month’s attacks on the United States transformed Bush from a hesitant leader, who came to office after an indecisive and disputed election, into a commander-in-chief who enjoys the backing and approval of the vast majority of Americans.
“We are joined in this operation by our staunch friend, Great Britain,” Bush declared, adding Canada, Australia, Germany and France had also pledged forces.
“More than 40 countries in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and across Asia have granted air transit or landing rights. Many more have shared intelligence. We are supported by the collective will of the world,” he said.
Many Western governments quickly lined up behind the United States. Pakistan, the only state still to recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government, said the Taliban had brought the strikes on themselves.
But condemnation came from Iraq, Iran and the Palestinian Hamas movement, which is responsible for a series of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.
In declaring the beginning of the military operation, Bush followed in the footsteps of his father, former President George Bush, almost 11 years after his father announced the start of the Gulf War against Iraq.
The attack came hours after Washington rejected an offer from Afghanistan’s Taliban to put bin Laden on trial — a last-ditch attempt to stave off U.S. military action.
Bin Laden, 44, an Islamic militant from a wealthy Saudi family, has been defying U.S. efforts to capture or kill him for years. Since 1996, he has been living under the protection of the Taliban in Afghanistan in a remote mountain redoubt.
He has been indicted for the deadly 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, and was linked to last October’s attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, which killed 17 American servicemen.
U.S. ULTIMATUM IGNORED
Bush had presented the Taliban with an ultimatum, demanding that it surrender bin Laden and lieutenants in his al Qaeda network, close his training camps, allow international inspections, and release detained aid workers.
He said if they failed to comply, the Taliban would share the fate of bin Laden.
The Taliban adheres to an extreme, puritanical form of Islam, under which women are not allowed to work, seek education or show their unveiled faces in public.
In the last hours before the U.S. strikes, with reports of defections by some of
its supporters, the Taliban reacted with a mixture of defiance and attempts at conciliation.
It said 8,000 troops were being sent to its northern border with Uzbekistan to join several thousand already there.
“We will never bow before the Americans and will fight to the last,” a Taliban spokesman said.
The United Nations says a quarter of Afghanistan’s 24 million people are dependent on food aid, and that more than a million people have fled their homes in a country ravaged by war and drought. It estimated that up to 1.5 million more people may try to cross into neighboring countries.
The food drops that followed the bombing by nine hours involved 37,500 packages sent to earth without parachutes into remote areas of Afghanistan.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the packages carry a full daily meal for the average adult.
“They (the packages) carry a message that they are ‘a food gift from the people of the United States of America’,” Whitman told Reuters.
The two-pound Humanitarian Daily Ration packages are designed to be religiously and culturally acceptable to all people. They include rice, vegetables, fruit and a variety of nutritious ingredients while avoiding items such as pork, for example, which is not eaten by Muslims.
In financial markets, the bombing caused investors to begin parking cash in money markets, while gold and oil prices, which are sensitive to sounds of war, inched higher. The dollar held steady against the euro and the yen.
“It is not such a shockingly unexpected event that it will put markets into disarray, but how it unfolds over the next few days will be key,” said Anthony Karydakis, senior financial economist at Banc One Capital Markets in Chicago.
He expects major stock markets worldwide to weaken, with the Dow Jones industrials on Monday selling off by 200 or 300 points, or about three percent, at the open.