US planes pound Kabul

American bombers have resumed their attacks on Kabul overnight and pounded targets round the northern Afghan town of Mazar-i-Sharif to help the advance of Northern Alliance forces on both cities.

Reports from Kabul indicated that the air raids were met with fierce anti-aircraft fire from heavy machinegun batteries. Many of the anti-aircraft weapons, short-range rockets and heavy machineguns are mounted on the back of trucks. They could put up formidable ground fire if the Northern Alliance try a frontal assault on the capital.

American fighter bombers also struck Taliban frontlines to the north of the capital round the air base at Bagram and south of Charikar. They also hit Taliban forward positions round Mazar-i-Sharif, where two guerrilla groups led by the Uzbek warlord General Dostan and the Shia leader Karim Khalili are making slow progress in trying to take the city.

It had been suggested in Washington that the Bush administration was holding back from giving full support to the Northern Alliance because of their extreme violence when they were last running Kabul in the early Nineties, and because the Pakistan leader General Musharraf wants to keep some element of the Taliban in power.

Overnight the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld emphatically denied this. "We are not holding back at all."

He repeated that the main aim of Operation Enduring Freedom for the US and Operation Veritas for the few British forces involved so far, is "to destroy Taliban and al Qaeda Forces". He said the attacks could go on for several more weeks.

The US is being urged by General Musharraf to get most of their ground operation over by the beginning of the Muslim month of fast Ramadan, which begins on 17 November. "One would hope for restraint during the month of Ramadan because this would certainly have negative effects in the Muslim world."

Rumsfeld and the US military command under General Richard Myers have refused to give any undertaking that the campaign would slow down during Ramadan. "We are not going to take any notice of Ramadan or the winter," said Edward Luttwak, a senior military adviser to the Bush administration.

The Americans have said they cannot confirm or deny reports that up to 100 people may have died when a hospital in Herat was hit on Monday. "We have no evidence of this," said a Pentagon spokesman. Donald Rumsfeld rejected Taliban boasts that they had shot down two US helicopters during operations by Rangers at the weekend. "This is false," he said.

The Taliban have provided Al Jazeera television of Qatar with pictures of what looks like a wheel and part of the undercarriage of a CH-47 Chinook - the main troop carrier of the US and British helicopters fleets. The Taliban said they had also found "traces of blood" in the desert south-west of Kandahar. The Chinooks were most probably involved in extracting the Ranger party which attacked two targets in the region on Friday. The damage is compatible with a "heavy landing" if it was forced to drop on the ground to avoid anti-aircraft fire.

The Rangers attacked the compound in Kandahar of the spiritual leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar, and collected a large haul of documentation. A second group parachuted onto an primitive airstrip at Bibi Tera 80 miles south-west of Kandahar.