The explosions in Kabul damaged the second floor of a hotel owned by the Taleban. No one was hurt in the explosions, officials said. No one claimed responsibility for the explosions, but the Taleban blamed the opposition Northern Alliance for the blasts.

Taleban militia used tanks and air support in Kalafghan district, about 18 miles east of Takhar. A spokesman for the Northern Alliance, Mohammad Habeel, said Taleban forces initially gained ground, but he asserted that the alliance was offering strong resistance and that more than 50 Taleban troops were killed or injured.

Habeel said some alliance fighters were killed or injured, but other sources put the number of the causalities at 15.

A top Afghan opposition official in Tajikistan said Friday that the heaviest military advance of the summer launched by Afghanistan's ruling Taleban military had been repelled.

Sa’id Ibrahim Hikmat, the Northern Alliance's senior representative in neighbouring Tajikistan, told AFP that 200 Taleban fighters had been killed in fighting that began Thursday.

He disclosed no losses among troops supporting Ahmad Shah Mas’ood, who controls only a portion of territory in the north of Afghanistan.

Taleban tanks and bombers drove toward the Kalafgan district, 30 kilometres (19 miles) east of the Takhar provincial capital Taloqan, and gained ground before meeting strong resistance, Taleban officials said.

Hikmat admitted that the Northern Alliance forces suffered initial losses, but claimed that Mas’ood's forces reclaimed all of the lost territory within hours of battle.

"In some regions, we have made advances on the Taleban," Hikmat said.

The fundamentalist militia, which seized Kabul in 1996 and now controls most of the country, is trying to turn Afghanistan into a pure Islamic state through a unique and puritanical version of Islamic law.

But it is still battling various Islamic opposition groups affiliated loosely under the Mas’ood-led Northern Alliance.

Mas’ood, the defence minister in the ousted government of president Burhanuddin Rabbani, was driven from Taloqan last summer as the Taleban overran neighbouring Baghlan province and advanced north into Takhar.

Taleban information ministry officials told this scribe here on Thursday that from the Afghan capital Kabul, Taleban attacked the opposition from the Lataband front, 16 miles southeast of Taloqan, the capital of Takhar province.