By KATHY GANNON and AMIR SHAH
Associated Press Writers

KABUL, Afghanistan - The United States launched a third night of attacks on Afghanistan on Tuesday, with the Taliban reporting strikes around Kandahar, the ruling militia's headquarters, and the northwestern city of Herat. Anti-aircraft fire and the roar of jets could be heard in the capital, Kabul.

The new round of strikes came after the first confirmation of civilian casualties from the U.S. attacks. Four workers for a U.N.-affiliated mine-clearing agency in an office located about 300 yards from anti-aircraft batteries in Kabul _ a likely U.S. target _ were killed Monday night.

In Kabul, Taliban gunners opened up Tuesday night with heavy bursts of anti-aircraft fire amid the jets' roar. There was no indication of any bombing. The firing appeared to be coming from east, west and north of the city.

A Taliban soldier, reached by telephone at a garrison in the southern city of Kandahar late Tuesday, said the Americans were hitting targets near but not inside the city.

"We can hear the explosions," he said, refusing to give his name. "There is darkness all around us. Our anti-aircraft guns are trying to target them but they are flying at a very high altitude." Taliban sources said the home of Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, about nine miles outside Kandahar, was struck for the third time.

In Herat, the strikes targeted military sites on the edge of the city and the airport, including a site near the airport that three cruise missiles failed to hit earlier, another Taliban official said.

A Bush administration official in Washington confirmed the new round of nighttime strikes, but U.S. officials would not detail targets.

Earlier, the Taliban said Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States, had survived the bombings, and they repeated their refusal to hand him over to the United States.

"He is alive, his health is very good and he is in Afghanistan," the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, told CNN. He also said Mullah Omar, who had left his house on Sunday night, was alive.

Kandahar was also struck Tuesday morning _ the first daylight bombing of the campaign, a sign of increasing U.S. confidence that its planes are reasonably safe from anti-aircraft defenses. Strikes the night before targeted areas around Kabul and in the north, where an opposition alliance has been fighting the Taliban for years.

The mine-clearing agency's office on the edge of Kabul where the four security guards were killed was 300 yards from anti-aircraft artillery batteries and a Taliban transmission tower. The tower was knocked out, and Taliban radio has been off the air since Monday night's strikes.

U.N. spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker said the security guards, who were privately hired by a mine-clearing agency contracted by the United Nations, were spending the night in the office and hadn't been warned or told to relocate.

"It was assumed they were safe where they were. Otherwise, they would have been relocated for sure," she said in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

"I think Afghans in general are aware of what's where," Bunker said, referring to potential targets. "We specifically instructed staff that if they feel endangered, they should abandon their duty situations."

She appealed for the U.S.-led coalition to take care not to hurt civilians. "People need to distinguish between combatants and those innocent civilians who do not bear arms."

The United Nations evacuated international staff from Afghanistan at the outset of the crisis, but Afghan nationals working for U.N. organizations or groups under U.N. contract remained behind. The mine-clearing agency said last week it had suspended its operations.

The United States has emphasized that it is not targeting civilians in the attacks.

The Taliban said Tuesday that dozens of people have been killed in the U.S.-led raids, launched after weeks of fruitless attempts to get Afghanistan's rulers to hand over bin Laden. There was no independent confirmation of the Taliban claim.

"In this freestyle game, Washington is aiming firstly to hunt the sitting Islamic government in Afghanistan and then every committed Muslim in the name of terrorism," Zaeef told reporters in Islamabad.

The envoy said there were no casualties among the ranks of the Taliban fighters. "The Taliban are very strong," he said.

In Afghanistan's north, the northern alliance continued to confront Taliban troops. The fighting came close to the border with neighboring Tajikistan at several points, said Russian border guards.

The northern alliance's foreign minister said the Taliban were weakened because U.S. strikes on their small air force had cut off Taliban forces in the north from those farther south. "The Taliban are in a really hard situation at this moment in northern Afghanistan," the minister, Abdullah, who goes by only one name, told CNN.

Afghan sources contacted from Pakistan said communications and air defenses at the Kandahar airport had taken a severe beating in the U.S. bombardment. They said Mullah Omar had been contacting Taliban commanders by radio to assure them he was alive.

Kabul residents spent another sleepless night amid the roar of explosions and the rattle of anti-aircraft guns. Adam Khan and his family of five were fleeing Tuesday on a truck piled high with belongings, heading out of the capital to an eastern district to escape more strikes.

They had been sleeping in their basement during the bombardment, he said. "All night the women and children were crying," he said. "They were very worried _ scared."

Targets in Monday night's raids included the airport in Kabul in addition to the hill where the transmission tower is located, according to the private Afghan Islamic Press agency in Islamabad.

The tower was once used for television broadcasts, but the Taliban have banned television since they came to power in 1996. It was not clear whether or how the tower was used since.

Early Tuesday, sitting in front of the mine-clearing agency's collapsed two-story building in Kabul's eastern Macroyan neighborhood, Mohammed Afzl wept. His brother was one of the four workers killed, and he waited for bulldozers to clear the rubble and remove the bodies. A fifth person was injured in the strike.

"My brother is buried under there," he said. "What can we do? Our lives are ruined."

U.S. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the bombardment Monday night was accompanied by a renewed air drop of humanitarian assistance. Humanitarian groups have said, however, that such airdrops are much less effective than road deliveries.

Britain, which participated in the first wave of assaults Sunday, did not take part in Monday's follow-up.

The Taliban are still holding eight international relief workers, including two Americans, detained in August for allegedly preaching Christianity in Muslim Afghanistan.

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Gannon contributed to this dispatch from Islamabad, Pakistan.