US jets raided the eastern city of Jalalabad tonight, pounding the darkened and curfew-bound town with several bombs, some aimed at military bases, witnesses and news agencies said.
The first strikes in the bombardment hit an army installation in the east of the city, injuring at least six people, the private Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) said.
Two more bombs exploded on the outskirts of the city.
Jalalabad, long surrounded by militant training camps - including some used by Saudiborn dissident Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network - has seen particularly heavy bombardment since the US launched its first strikes on the country last Sunday night.
US planes aiming at positions of the Taliban's No.1 Corps in the east of Jalalabad dropped several bombs and some hit houses in the area, AIP qouted an official as saying from Jalalabad.
The bombs struck as a convoy of foreign reporters was on its way to the city - the first foreign journalists allowed into Afghanistan since all foreigners in the country were ordered to leave just days after the September 11th suicide plane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The reporters were on a Taliban-organised trip to a village near Jalalabad where officials say at least 160 people were killed earlier this week when several bombs fell in the area.
We have brought you here to see the cruelty of the Americans, said Maulvi Atiqullah, director of the Jalalabad information department.
Taliban officials have said the US strike on the hillside village of Khorum near Jalalabad accounted for more than half of some 300 deaths reported by the Taliban since the start of the bombardment.
Afghanistan is now undergoing its seventh straight night of US attacks as Washington tries to flush out bin Laden who has been sheltered by the Taliban since the mid-1990s.
Meanwhile the Taliban’s spiritual leader called on the world's Muslims to decide between supporting Afghanistan and the United States.
You, the Muslims of the world who are watching with your own eyes the American atrocities on Afghanistan, does your faith allow you to sit silent or to support America, Mullah Mohammad Omar said in a message obtained by AIP.
His statement was more measured than recent messages in which he has said it was a religious obligation for Muslims to declare a jihad, or holy war, against the United States.
Mullah Omar said the United States was bombing Afghanistan to mask the failure of its intelligence agencies to prevent the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington by suicide plane hijackers.
America attacked Afghanistan without any proof so as to hide the failure of its intelligence agencies and using different pretexts to finish Islamic countries, he was quoted as saying.
Mullah Omar also insisted again that bin Laden would never be handed over, saying that in any case no extradition treaty existed between Afghanistan and the United States because Washington had never recognised the Taliban government.
We have no such agreement with America that we hand over a person to them, he said.
Our sin is that we have imposed an Islamic system in our country and have given protection to a homeless Muslim, oppressed, who cannot even find a place in any part of the world to sit for an hour. He warned that Afghanistan would not take continued punishment against its people without responding.