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Life a struggle in target-rich site©Associated Press
© St. Petersburg Times, QUETTA, Pakistan -- When darkness falls, it is absolute: There's no electricity, and those who light lamps or candles risk Taliban punishment. Many people don't have money for food, but even if they do, shop after shop is shuttered tight. The Afghan city of Kandahar lies at the heart of the confrontation over Osama bin Laden, suspected of engineering the attacks six weeks ago on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The birthplace and home base of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement, it has been the target of relentless air assaults for 17 straight days. Kandahar and its surrounding area provide what U.S. military planners call a target-rich environment: Taliban headquarters, training bases thought to have been used by bin Laden's al-Qaida network, an airport largely given over to military purposes, the compound of Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. Some key sites have been hit several times, or more, since the air raids began Oct. 7. But the city is not only a Taliban garrison, it is home to a half-million people, or was before the airstrikes. Fleeing citizens reaching safety in Pakistan on Tuesday described a ghost town, emptying of people and filled with fear. "It has a deserted look," said merchant Mohammed Nabi, 55, who left the city before dawn to join his family in Pakistan. "And of those who remain, everyone is talking only about how they can get away from Kandahar." The United States has said repeatedly that civilians are not being targeted in the airstrikes. But many refugees arriving in Quetta -- the nearest large Pakistani city to Kandahar, with whole neighborhoods populated by former Kandaharis -- say they feel very much under the gun. "Even if it is an accident, you are still dead if a bomb hits a house made of mud," said Mohammed Nasir, who gathered up his wife and three children and bribed his way into Pakistan after the latest night of airstrikes. A week earlier, a neighbor's house in Kandahar's Shahri Nau district was demolished, he said, injuring all three people inside. His family left that very night for an outlying district, but felt in danger there too, and stayed only long enough to raise money for the trip. Nasir's eyes were red-rimmed and his face drawn with exhaustion. "These days, nobody is sleeping very much in Kandahar," he said. Haji Mussajan, a 60-year-old farmer, said he abandoned his orchard on the outskirts of Kandahar to seek shelter with relatives in Quetta, bringing his daughter and infant granddaughter with him. "We left in fear of our lives," he said. "Every day and every night, we hear the roaring and roaring of planes, we see the smoke, the fire. Life there is totally ruined." Kandahar -- shabby and war-battered even before the air assault began -- has now become all but unlivable, the refugees say. The city's electrical grid was knocked out in airstrikes last week. That has essentially deprived the city of water as well, since electrical pumps do not work. Some people on the outskirts of town were trying to dig wells in their back yards, the new arrivals said. Taliban troops still patrol at night, they said, sometimes bursting into homes where they see a lamp or a candle flickering. So families wait out the nightly raids in darkness. "I curse them both -- the Taliban and America," said Mussajan. Several refugees said as they left the city at dawn Tuesday, they saw a gas station south of the city in flames from the latest strike, its pumps exploding. Most of those interviewed at a bus stop in Quetta, where taxis and minibuses arrive from the border, said they had heard of civilian casualties in the airstrikes, but only a few claimed to have witnessed them firsthand. Those who did, though, described them in minute detail. Nabi, the merchant, said that four days earlier he saw a demolished home in the Shah Khaber district and four bodies in and near the rubble. One, he said, was cut nearly in half. "It was very, very terrifying," he said. The Taliban claim civilian casualties in Kandahar alone number in the hundreds, and has put the nationwide total at upwards of 1,000. The Pentagon says such figures are highly inflated. Most of those interviewed said they thought about two-thirds of the city's inhabitants had fled, either making their way into Pakistan or taking shelter in the countryside. Any Taliban resistance to the airstrikes -- and to a U.S. commando raid last week, the first ground action to be publicly disclosed -- has taken place out of the sight of ordinary people, said 46-year-old teashop owner Ali Mohammed, who lived in a district on Kandahar's edge, near the main road to Kabul. "We are in our homes, trying to stay safe through a night," he said. "If the Taliban are fighting, we are not there to see it. Maybe they have all gone away to the mountains, and left us to our fate."
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