US planes bombed Kandahar, the Taliban's last bastion in Afghanistan yesterday as the military said the battle for the city may be nearing "culmination point".
The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, said the US believed Osama bin Laden was in southeastern Afghanistan and it was "just a matter of time" before he was found and the Taliban were defeated.
On the ground, US bombers pounded targets near Kandahar and ethnic Pashtun fighters attacked the southern city's airport. A tribal spokesman said earlier the Pashtun forces had met strong resistance from hundreds of bin Laden's Arab fighters entrenched there.
A senior US Marine officer said at an airstrip in southern Afghanistan he had expected the city to fall last week. "But you have a lot of forces at play. Opposition groups coming from the north down, from the southeast up, and us coming potentially from where we are," Maj James B. Higgins said.
The Marines based at the desert airstrip have made no immediate move on Kandahar, spiritual home of the Taliban and power-base of their leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar. With thousands of Taliban troops believed to be concentrated in the ancient walled city, the mullah has raised the spectre of fierce street battles, urging his men to fight to the death.
Witnesses arriving at the Pakistani border from Kandahar said they had seen no anti-Taliban forces inside the city, but that combat-ready fighters of bin Laden's al-Qaeda network were there.
The Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press said 13 civilians had died yesterday in air strikes on Kandahar airport and the city's southern outskirts. Last night, a Taliban official in southern Afghanistan said the radical Islamic militia was "still in control" of the airport.
In the eastern city of Jalalabad, an official said US air strikes had killed about 20 civilians in the mountainous Tora Bora area where bin Laden is reputed to have an underground hideout. A spokesman for the US Central Command said the military was looking into the reports.
The US Marines acknowledged for the first time that military liaison officers from Britain, Germany and Australia were also working with them at the southern airstrip to coordinate coalition forces in Afghanistan. The first French troops arrived in the country as an advance party of 58 marines began securing Mazar-e-Sharif airport on Saturday as part of their mission to help provide protection for humanitarian aid, the French Defence Ministry said.