Around 2,000 anti-Taliban troops have been battling with Osama bin Laden's fighters near mountain hideouts in Tora Bora.
The fighting took place south of Jalalabad and commanders say they are preparing to lay siege to the caves.
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Hayatullah, a 16 year old Northern Alliance soldier, stands guard with his comrades in a base of the First Strike Unit in Kabul suburbs
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US warplanes have frequently bombed the Tora Bora area, where bin Laden is reputed to have built an underground lair.
As Afghan factions neared a power-sharing deal in talks in Bonn, tribal fighters in the south said they had taken the town of Shahwali Kot near Kandahar amid ongoing US air strikes.
But the Pakistan-based AIP quoted Taliban sources as saying the assault had been repelled, with dozens of tribal fighters wounded and two captured, along with six vehicles.
There was no independent account of the fighting.
AIP said US warplanes had bombed the airport and targets in mountains south of Kandahar early today. It said an air raid on Kandahar city last night had hit an ambulance, killing four people. There was no confirmation.
The humanitarian situation, particularly for women and children in the Kandahar region and some other parts of Afghanistan, is still very, very serious, UNICEF executive director Ms Carol Bellamy said.
"We are talking about thousands, potentially millions, of children. The fact is the great majority of the population in the areas where there is still fighting or insecurity are at risk," she said.
The UN said factional fighting had made it unsafe for its international staff to return to Mazar-i-Sharif in the north.
In Bonn, rival Afghan factions struck a breakthrough deal on a UN blueprint for a broad-based interim government for their war-battered land, but still have to haggle over cabinet posts.
If all goes well we hope to have a signing ceremony tomorrow, UN spokesman Ahmad Fawzi said.
A UN spokesman in Islamabad said that a multi-national force might be deployed, if all sides agreed.