An 11th series of US-led air strikes have inflicted heavy damage on Taliban defensive positions, amid growing indications that ground troops will soon be deployed. Pentagon officials yesterday refused to confirm reports that US ground forces were already in action near the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, which was last night under heavy air attack.
On the humanitarian front, efforts to feed the Afghanistan population were seriously hindered with the seizure by the Taliban of almost half of the United Nations food aid in the country. A World Food Programme spokesman in Peshawar, Mr Michael Huggins, confirmed to The Irish Times last night that 7,000 tonnes of food - enough to feed more than 400,000 people for a month - were taken from two warehouses filled with wheat supplies in Kabul and Kandahar yesterday.
Iranian radio reported that US special forces were involved in fierce fighting near Kandahar, although the US would not comment. Earlier, the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, had indicated to the House of Commons that the time to use ground forces was approaching.
The US also made its first air strikes against Taliban front lines on the Shomali plain north of Kabul. However the opposition Northern Alliance, which has pleaded for the strikes as a prerequisite to an offensive on Kabul, dismissed the bombing as insignificant.
Alliance sources said two or three vehicles had been pulverised in the first strike against the nightly convoy of Taliban military, but the strikes fell short of the sustained bombardment they repeatedly called for.
Only 2 km separate Taliban and Alliance forces at Bagram at the centre of the Shomali plain.
Gen Djan Akhamat, the second-ranking Northern Alliance commander in Shomali, said his informers told him that "morale among Mullah Omar's troops has risen over the past 10 days" since they realised the US would neither target them nor help the Alliance.
Despite the Alliance's scepticism, a sustained US attack on the Taliban at Shomali could presage the fall of the capital.
The Taliban has deployed its highest concentration of troops in Shomali, believed to include most of the Arab, Pakistani and other foreign Muslim forces loyal to Osama bin Laden.
Afghanistan's second city and northern capital, Mazar-e-Sharif, was under heavy pressure from Alliance troops who were marshalling four miles to the south.