US prepares to take Kandahar

American and local Pashtun tribal armies are today preparing for a big battle to take Kandahar, the last city held by Taliban and al Qaeda forces.

"Everywhere the Taliban is looking they are coming under a lot of pressure, like a snake squeezing in on them,"said Major James Higgins, spokesman for the US Marines at their new base south of the city.

A group of 60 marines have started to set up a forward base at Jalalabad. British and US special forces have also been moving through mountain cave complexes and tunnels across southern Afghanistan. "The boys from 22 (SAS) have had some good fights," said a senior British officer at the weekend.

The US and British special forces have been joined by 155 Australian SAS, who have been given their own area of operations but are under American command, and units of the elite German police special forces.

Local Pashtun forces under Hamid Karzai of the Popalzai tribe, a staunch loyalist of the former king and of the former governor Gul Agha, are closing in on Kandahar. "Fierce fighting is going on south of the airport," Agha reported overnight.

American jets aiming to destroy a warren of tunnels deep inside Afghanistan's White Mountains, where Osama bin Laden is thought to be hiding, were this morning reported to have bombed an anti-Taliban command post in the second major accident in as many days.

A provincial military official in Jalalabad, working in coalition with the Northern Alliance, said US bombers killed eight senior Mujahideen officers planning an attack on the Taliban. Over the weekend scores of civilians were also reported to have died in a village about 15 miles from Jalalabad when waves of US planes bombed the Tora Bora cave complex.

The accidents, if confirmed, could not have come at a worse time for the allied special forces, crucial to the dangerous last stage in the hunt for Bin Laden.

Yesterday a small team of British, German and Australian special forces joined US marines at their air base 40 miles south of Kandahar. Some are believed to have joined American reconnaissance patrols and small teams of coalition soldiers who have been part of anti-Taliban forces encir-cling Kandahar. In the Tora Bora area, sympathies for the Taliban, which is dominated by Pashtuns from southern Afghanistan, run deep. Local anti-Taliban commanders, led by newly-installed Jalalabad governor Haji Abdul Qadeer, have worked hard to persuade locals to stop supporting the Taliban.

A US Air Force spokesman said that American planes had hit their intended targets around Tora Bora. "We know targets near Tora Bora south of Jalalabad fall into the realm of al Qaeda and Taliban strongholds. We are sure we are hitting these targets and we can account for all munitions," he said.

"The United States regrets any loss of innocent civilian lives. We will continue, however, to destroy al Qaeda and Taliban leadership and the places they do business," the spokesman said, claiming that any civilian victims had been taken to the site by Taliban or al Qaeda fighters.

Bin Laden is believed to be hiding in the Tora Bora caves, or somewhere near Kandahar, in a similar underground complex which was built with the help of the CIA during the Soviet occupation.

The staggering task facing allied soldiers in attacking Tora Bora and other tunnel hideouts has forced US officials to consider using chemical weapons.

Asked on NBC's Meet the Press programme at the weekend whether poison gas would be pumped into the caves, Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, did not rule it out.