US BLAMED FOR 100 MISSILE DEATHS
  Taliban claim village was flattened

Luke Harding in Islamabad and Jason Burke in Peshawar
Friday October 12, 2001
The Guardian

The Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, said that the village of Kouram in the eastern province of Nangarhar had suffered a direct hit during Wednesday night's bombardment, the heaviest since America started its attacks on Sunday.

"One hundred people are reported to have died in this attack," Mullah Zaeef declared in Islamabad.

One source has told the Guardian that the village was the site of a guerrilla training camp in the 1980s.

The Afghan Islamic Press agency echoed Mullah Zaeef's claim last night, quoting a Taliban spokesman in the area as saying that the village had been flattened. "So far more than 50 bodies have been recovered and the fear is that the number of martyrs will be more than 100," he added.

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, reacted angrily yesterday to Taliban allegations that American pilots were targeting civilians.

"It comes with ill grace for the Taliban to be suggesting that we are doing what they have made a practice and a livelihood out of," he said.

But he added: "There is no question but that when one is engaged militarily, then there is going to be unintended loss of life ... There's no question that I, nor anyone involved, regrets the loss of life.

"The munitions that are being used tend to be very precise. They are not 100%," the defence secretary said.

PSD To HTML conversion is important to webmasters because they cannot use the PSD file as it is for their web pages. if you need PSD To HTML conversion service save yourself some time, effort and money and send it in to the professionals.

The camp, 20 miles from Jalalabad, was abandoned in 1992. In recent years, sources say, some 60 to 70 poor landless families moved in. "On a satellite picture it would still look like a camp," the source said.

If the reports are confirmed, the attack would represent the worst intelligence failure so far in America's war on terrorism.

American planes also struck again in the western city of Kandahar, targeting a compound where Arab followers of Osama bin Laden had lived.

Besides people killed in Kouram, Mullah Zaeef says that more than 70 other civilians have died across the country.

They allegedly included 15 worshippers killed when a missile landed on a mosque in the suburbs of Jalalabad, also destroying four houses.

With every prospect of an imminent ground operation by US special forces against Osama bin Laden, the Taliban yesterday promised to fight any "aggressor" invasion force. "When Americans enter Afghanistan there will start real war, not now," Mullah Zaeef said.

The ambassador appeared to confirm American reports that two relatives of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's leader, had been killed in strikes on Kandahar earlier in the week.

While he claimed that they were "not immediate relatives", several residents who had fled Kandahar for Pakistan told Reuters news agency that the dead were Mullah Omar's 10-year-old son and his stepfather.

They said the Taliban leader had just left his home when a bomb struck one of his houses in the Sangisar district of the city, but many members of his family had been left inside.

They added that Mullah Omar's natural father had died years before and his mother had married his uncle.

The United Nations spokeswoman in Pakistan, Stephanie Bunker, said yesterday that Afghan staff had reported 20 civilian deaths in the northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif, and 10 civilian deaths in Kandahar. These could not be independently confirmed.

Meanwhile, a US air force sergeant was killed in a heavy equipment accident in Qatar, the first death in Operation Enduring Freedom