Afghan militia have launched a major operation to encircle the Tora Bora mountain lair of Osama bin Laden after US warplanes killed his financial manager and wounded - possibly killed - his deputy, a military commander said on Tuesday.
Mr Haji Mohammad Zaman, military chief of eastern Nangarhar province, claimed that bin Laden, wanted for the September 11th terrorist attacks on the US, was still alive and hiding in Tora Bora, a remote and rugged area of eastern Afghanistan.
In the south of the country, meanwhile, anti-Taliban forces have been held back in their quest to capture Kandahar Airport after encountering heavy resistance from the Taliban.
Mr Zaman said bin Laden's financial manager, Ali Mahmud, was killed and Ayman al-Zawahiri, considered bin Laden's deputy, was injured or possibly killed on Monday in US air-strikes near the mountain fortress.
"I am not sure whether he is injured or he died," said Mr Zaman. There was no independent confirmation of the report.
Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician known as "The Doctor" who founded the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, was said to be the number two man in bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. Some have also called him bin Laden's mentor and the real brains in the movement.
Mr Zaman told reporters in Jalalabad, about 50 kilometres north of Tora Bora, that Mahmud was killed by a US bomb in the village of Wouchnow.
"Yesterday, when they bombed, they killed 18 persons . . . (including) the financial manager of Osama, the one who was responsible for the money," he said. Al-Zawahiri was hit in the same bombing.
Mr Zaman said his forces had launched an operation to encircle the cave complex, which would also target hundreds of bin Laden supporters, mainly Arabs, who were given the chance to depart peacefully but refused.
"We started to move people today," he said. "They must surround the place where the Arabs are living here. We need to send there around 4,000 people."
He said that once the area had been surrounded, an attack could be launched in "maybe two, three days". Mr Zaman, appointed to his post last month following the withdrawal of the Taliban militia from the north of the country, said on Monday that US special forces troops had been in Jalalabad for more than a week.
He said US helicopters had also landed on Sunday night. Nearly 100 civilians had died over the past three days during intense air raids, with some wayward bombs hitting villages, Mr Zaman said.
US officials said they had struck only military targets and had no reports of villages hit.
US warplanes have been hammering Tora Bora and Kandahar for days, hoping to crush bin Laden, his al-Qaeda network and Afghanistan's crumbling Taliban regime which had protected them since 1996.
But despite the backing of the aerial bombardments, opposition forces were stalled in their advance towards Kandahar Airport by a heavy Taliban counter-attack, sources said.
The tribal forces had hoped to take the airport on Monday evening after claiming to have captured half the complex during intense battles with forces, including Arabs, loyal to al-Qaeda.
A spokesman for the US-led coalition against terrorism, Mr Kenton Keith, described the situation around Kandahar as extremely unpredictable and confused. "To say that it is fluid is to perhaps give too great a sense of cohesion. The situation is changing as we speak," he told a press conference in Islamabad.
US Marines have set up a base south of Kandahar but have not joined in the fighting. Officials said yesterday that 30 Australian Special Air Services troops had joined them and another 120 were on their way.
The Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, has vowed to fight to the death.
Patrick Smyth adds from Washington: A report in yesterday's Washington Post claims that US intelligence now fears that al-Qaeda may have made more progress towards creating a so-called "dirty" nuclear weapon than previously believed. Such a bomb would be ignited by conventional explosives, and hence has lower explosive potential than a traditional nuclear bomb, but would spread deadly radioactive material over a substantial area.
The article clams that the fears arise from interrogations of al-Qaeda members and searches of their premises inside Afghanistan and evidence of a meeting within the last year at which a member of the group is alleged to have brandished a container in which he claimed was radioactive material.
A United States special forces soldier has been shot and wounded in Afghanistan, CBS Television said late last night. "It is reported he is now stable in hospital with bullet wounds," the network said.
The US television channel also said the shooting took place in southern Afghanistan near Kandahar, the last stronghold of the ousted Taliban regime.