die bei der Minenentsorgung halfen,durch Bombe beim Angriff in Kabul gestern getötet Quelle:
PESHAWAR: Masses of refugees on the move and American soldiers who may have to go to war face a hidden menace in Afghanistan: millions of buried land mines. In the best of times, as many as 10 people step on mines in Afghanistan each day. However, as an estimated 1 million Afghans flee their homes, experts fear that many more people will be maimed or killed by weapons they can’t see.
Then-Soviet troops, their mujahideen enemies and Afghan armies fighting a civil war laid at least 6 million mines that are now waiting to explode, said Haji Attiqullah, whose Mine Clearance Planning Agency has mapped minefields across Afghanistan.
Small antipersonnel mines take the highest toll. They usually blow off limbs, often leaving the victim to die a slow, agonizing death, said Attiqullah, a former mujahideen who lost his right eye battling the Soviets during the 1980s.
Attiqullah, whose UN-funded agency shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize as part of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, has videotape of an Afghan boy struggling to breathe his last breath after a mine blast mangled his body and charred his face beyond recognition.
The opposition Northern Alliance, whose efforts to drive the hardline Taliban regime from power have gained US support, has been laying minefields since 1996, Kelly said. The Taliban may be doing the same, he said.
But mine-clearing operations in Afghanistan have stopped since the September 11 attacks on the US, as have relief and development efforts, so Kelly doesn’t know whether more of the devices are being laid to prepare for a new, wider war.
“I suspect there is going to be some” mine laying, said Kelly, a Canadian. “However, that hasn’t been confirmed. Over the period from 1995 to now, we have definite proof that the Northern Alliance has been laying mines. We have no conclusive proof for the Taliban.”
Only two of Afghanistan’s 30 provinces are free of land mines, which Kelly said contaminate about 891 million square yards of Afghan soil. That’s about 287 square miles of minefields. But because the weapons are hidden underground, and no one knows how many new ones are being laid, virtually every footstep anywhere in Afghanistan can be risky.
During a decade-plus of work in Afghanistan, sappers have meticulously located and removed more than 10,000 antitank mines, 221,000 antipersonnel mines and 1.4 million pieces of unexploded ordnance, such as bombs and artillery shells, according to UN figures.
KABUL: High-flying jets bombed the stronghold of Afghanistan's Taliban militia in southern Kandahar hours after dawn on Tuesday, Taliban officials said - the first daylight raid since the American-led attacks began.
Four Afghan United Nations workers were reported killed hours earlier on Monday night in a US raid on Kabul.
There was no immediate US confirmation that American planes had carried out the strikes on Kandahar, although the Taliban blamed the United States.
Taliban soldiers replied with heavy anti-aircraft fire as the planes streaked over the city at about 8:15 a.m. (0345 GMT) Tuesday, said Mohammed Hamid, a Taliban official in Kandahar.
The strike on Kandahar, the seat of the rigorously Islamic militia that rules Afghanistan, came shortly after a lone, unidentified jet screamed through the early dawn sky over the capital, Kabul, dropping a bomb north of the city near the airport.
The US-led military campaign, in which Britain is also taking part, is aimed at punishing the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden, accused of plotting the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington that left more than 5,500 people dead or missing.
Hours earlier, on Monday night, three US bombs were dropped on Kabul from a high-flying jet. Officials at the scene the following morning said the victims were UN workers who cleared anti-personnel mines in Kabul, one of the world's most heavily mined cities.
Doctors at Kabul's Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a fifth man was treated and released.
Mohammed Afzl, who said his brother was killed, sat Tuesday morning in front of the collapsed two-story building where the office was located, waiting for bulldozers to clear the rubble.
"My brother is buried under there," he said. "What can we do? Our lives are ruined."
The United States has emphasized that it is not targeting civilians in its military campaign. The mine-clearing office was located in a building near a Taliban radio tower.
The independent Afghan Islamic Press agency in Islamabad, Pakistan, said targets included the airport in Kabul and a hill where a TV transmission tower is located.
The agency said one bomb landed near a 400-bed women's hospital in Kabul but made no mention of any damage. The reports could not be immediately confirmed.
Lights went out in Kabul soon after the attack began, and Taliban radio ordered people to close blinds, shut off lights and stay indoors.
Taliban positions around the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif were also attacked Monday, the Afghan press agency reported.
The Afghan press agency said the northern alliance launched a major attack Monday evening on the Taliban position near Dara-e-Suf in Samangan
Five long-range bombers - a pair of B-2 stealth bombers flying from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, and three B-1B's from the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia - joined 10 strike planes launched from aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea. They targeted air defense and other military targets across Afghanistan.
Two US Navy ships, the destroyers USS John Paul Jones and USS McFaul, and one submarine launched a total of 15 Tomahawk cruise missiles.
The United States, however, is airdropping food from C-17 cargo planes. The first such flights Sunday dropped 37,500 food packages that were designed to flutter to the ground rather than plummeting straight down.
