Afghanis weary as bombs fall nearby

By Amir Shah

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan — They emerged into the crisp morning, stared at their mile-high city and knew war was visiting again.

Misery and uncertainty have been a near constant in the lives of the people of the Afghan capital for more than two decades now. But even for them the attacks by the United States and Britain were difficult to face.

"I don’t understand why the people of Afghanistan are such unlucky people," said Mirza Mohammed, leaving town Monday morning with his four children for Logar province in the central part of Afghanistan.

"I haven’t seen Osama bin Laden in my life," he said.

Hours later, explosions reverberated again as the United States launched a second nighttime assault on Taliban positions around the capital, the Taliban’s home base of Kandahar, and Afghanistan’s north.

In the daylight hours between the two assaults, things appeared as normal as possible in a capital that has endured so many years of war. Markets opened as usual. The city, already just a shell of what it was even after 10 years of Soviet occupation, looked the same Monday morning as it had at dawn on Sunday.

But ravaged psyches don’t show the way damaged buildings do.

Shaken residents sought to make sense of the attacks, which Washington and London said were aimed at crippling the ruling Taliban’s air defenses while an international coalition hunts down top terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden.

Mohammed Jalil said the first bomb Sunday fell near his home in the northwest of the city, close to Maranjan Hill, site of former King Mohammed Zaher Shah’s father’s tomb.

"Oh my God — we don’t know what is happening in this country," said Jalil, a waiter. He looks after an entire extended family, including his sister-in-law, whose husband was killed after the Soviets invaded in 1979.

"Now we are afraid we will make another sacrifice, this time by American rockets," he said.

His son, Hamid, 12, said 20 pieces of shrapnel shattered the windows of their house. "All the night, we were in the basement with our neighbors," Hamid said.

Jan Mohammed, 45, drives a donkey cart filled with tomatoes. "I can’t go anywhere. All I have is what I grow," he said.

"What if a bomb falls on our house? We will be killed. My children, everybody hid in the basement last night. Where are the poor people of Afghanistan supposed to go?"