- Kabul, Kandahar Pounded As Special Forces Wait Nearby
- Three Mile Island Alert Ends, After 'Credible Threat'
- Bush In China, Cheney To Visit Ground Zero
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A Taliban soldier, about 30 miles west of Jalalabad
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That's according to Afghans phoning in from the war zone near Kandahar, where they say about 150 men armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades are guarding the compound of Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar.
The Taliban issued an appeal Thursday, saying Afghanistan is running short of food and medicine and needs help.
Those reports came as President Bush arrived in Shanghai, where he'll be pushing the war against terrorism in meetings with the leaders of China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, at the Asian Pacific Economic Conference summit.
Trade is the reason for the summit, and Mr. Bush says that can be used as well as an economic weapon against terrorists.
"We will defeat them," said the president, "by expanding and encouraging world trade."
trip to China for the APEC summit.
The Taliban also said Thursday that Omar, all Taliban leaders, and Sept. 11 terror attacks suspect Osama bin Laden are alive and well.
"The leadership and our guests (bin Laden and his associates) are mobile and safe, and Americans can't find them," declared Abdul Hanan Himat, a Taliban spokesman.
However, the London-based Islamic Observation Center said an Egyptian known by the nom de guerre Abu Baseer al-Masri was killed by a U.S. strike near the northeastern city of Jalalabad. Al-Masri, a member of the Egyptian radical group al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, had been in Afghanistan for 10 years with al-Qaida and was close to bin Laden's top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, say former fighters in Afghanistan.
The center on Thursday also relayed a statement from Mohammed Atef, the military commander and the No. 3 leader of al-Qaida, warning that U.S. troops will suffer the same fate in Afghanistan they did in Somalia, where bodies of slain soldiers were dragged through the streets.
The Taliban also claims as many as 12 civilians were killed today when a U.S. air strike hit a truck filled with residents fleeing Chaparhar, in Jalalabad.
Except for the geographic location, the claim is nearly identical to another Taliban statement made 24 hours earlier.
The Taliban also says over 400 people have been killed since the bombing began.
None of those reports have been independently verified; the Pentagon earlier this week dismissed some Taliban casualty reports as false.
The remote-controlled RQ-1 aircraft have been modified by the Air Force to carry two Hellfire missiles. Defense experts called such a move a first step toward perhaps one day building unmanned, long-range bombers that can carry dozens of missiles and bombs to overseas targets without risking human crews.
CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reports Afghan resistance fighters who have been locked for years in a stalemate with Taliban fighters are now being directly aided by the U.S. military.
F-15 Eagles, the Air Force's premier ground attack aircraft, flew all the way from Kuwait to strike Taliban front lines, to assist rebels in their battle to seize the crossroads town of Mazr-e-Sharif and its airport.
The rebels are reported to be close to success; the Taliban denies that.
U.S. special operations forces meanwhile are poised nearby, in the Indian Ocean, waiting for the signal to begin the next phase of the war.
The forces specialize in lightning raids and other types of secret missions.
In Pakistan, a U.N. official says the Taliban has returned one of two World Food Program warehouses it had seized at gunpoint early this week. The WFP says the 5,300 tons of wheat the warehouse contained has also been returned.
Meanwhile, an employee in CBS News Anchor Dan Rather's office has tested positive for the skin form of anthrax, the network said Thursday.
"She is expected to make a full recovery; in fact, she feels fine," said Andrew Heyward, CBS News president. He said she was being treated with antibiotics.
The employee experienced swelling in her face Oct. 1 and reported her symptoms to health officials. It was not immediately known how she became infected, but she handled mail.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said there was no sign of anyone else at CBS with symptoms.
Anthrax has already been found on the skin of an assistant to NBC-TV News anchor Tom Brokaw and the infant son of an ABC-TV producer who took the child on a visit to the network's office.
Also Thursday, a postal worker who may have handled tainted letters sent to NBC and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle tested positive for exposure to anthrax, state sources said.
And in what may be the first case of tainted mail outside the United States, officials in Kenya said Thursday a letter mailed to an unidentified recipient in their country from Atlanta has tested positive for anthrax spores.
The Senate was open for business Thursday, continuing work despite the anthrax scare that convinced House leaders to shut down operations through the weekend to allow for extensive environmental testing.
While the theory that the anthrax scare might be the work of Osama bin Laden is aggressively being investigated, authorities have said they have "no credible evidence" that this is so.
anthrax scare
Similarly, there is a nationwide alert today for a tractor-trailer filled with fertilizer and pesticides, stolen Tuesday or Wednesday from a trucking company in Parsippany, N.J.
Authorities say they don't have any evidence that the vehicle was taken by terrorists; it could have been a simple theft.
The truck, which has a yellow Freightliner cab, has the word "Penske" on the side, has an Indiana registration, number 171469, is 45 feet long, has "Rockland" written in green letters in four different places, and is a 1988 Freuhauf model with New Jersey registration T392VD.
Another alert - at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania - is now over. Military aircraft, police and FBI had been called to the area yesterday in response to what officials called "a credible threat."
In New York, tight security is in effect, with the day ahead holding both a visit from Vice President Dick Cheney and a high-level court proceeding at the federal courthouse just blocks away from Ground Zero.
Four terrorist disciples of bin Laden, convicted in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, received life without parole Thursday in a city still coping with the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
They were convicted on charges of plotting the bombings to comply with a 1998 fatwa - an edict - by bin Laden to kill Americans.
One of the four men was bin Laden's personal secretary.
©MMI CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reuters Limited and The Associated Press contributed to this report.