United States and British air strikes in Afghanistan on Sunday morning left many in the DeKalb community worried and concerned.

Three Afghan cities have been bombed including its capital, Kabul, along with southern Kandahar and western Jalabad.

In the past few weeks, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed their impatience with their constant demands on the Taliban.

Bush told reporters Sunday that he gave the Taliban “a series of clear demands: close terrorist training camps, hand over leaders of the Al-Qaeda network and return all foreign nationals, including American citizens unjustly detained in our country. None of these demands were met. And now, the Taliban will pay a price.”

Many in the community are saddened by the attacks. When the Rev. Joe Gasiger heard the news of the air strikes, he immediately said a prayer.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Gasiger, of the Newman Catholic Student Center. “There are many orphans and women left without families. I hope the people undertaking the attacks are smart enough to minimize the creation of any extraordinary suffering.”

Gasiger added this was not a religious attack at all, but a belief in retaliatory violence which is as much Christian as it is any other faith or culture. He said about 400 Muslims died in the World Trade Center attacks on Sept.11.

Abdullah Alghanim, from the Islamic Society of DeKalb, doesn’t see air strikes as the solution and wishes the U.S. took more time to settle things diplomatically.

“I don’t think air strikes will be helpful,” he said. “Afghanistan is not like Iraq and Yugoslavia regimes because they [the Taliban] don’t have sophisticated military and communication infrastructure.”

If air strikes persist then “not much things will be left to destroy,” Alghanim said.

Alghanim thinks the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan will take the air strikes as an opportunity to fight back against the Taliban. He said if the war continues this might offend Muslims because their holy month of Ramadan is 40 days from now.

“The civilians will become sandwiched between the Taliban and the northern opposition alliance,” he said.

Diana Swanson, an associate professor in women’s studies and English, also is concerned.

“I’m very saddened by the fact that we bombed Afghanistan,” she said. “I just really hope we’re not killing people, especially innocent civilians.

“I think we need to do something about terrorism, but we shouldn’t be impatient. We should be looking to more international institutions and law like the U.N. and the international court of justice in the Netherlands.”

Many in the community like Michael Klass, from the Northern Coalition for Peace and Justice, think that even though air strikes are targeted at Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda networks and air energy facilities of the Taliaban, civilians won’t be unaffected.

“Innocent civilians don’t die immediately,” Klass said. “Many attacks in the past have resulted in the destruction of access to clean drinking water.”

Al-Jazeera news agency released a statement by bin Laden on Sunday. In it, he said, “Millions of innocent children are being killed in Iraq and in Palestine and we don’t hear a word

from the infidels. We don’t hear a raised voice. When the sword falls on the United States, they cry for their children and they cry for their people. The least you can say about these people is that they are sinners. They have helped evil triumph over good.”

Klass doesn’t think this justifies terrorist attacks but thinks that people are afraid to ask the forbidden question — why would someone do this?

“We can all agree that they’re fanatic lunatics, but we would be lunatics to think they didn’t do it for a reason,” Klass said.

The coalition has a list of proposals to resolve U.S. foreign policy involving economic policy and the ceasing of arms supplies to countries supporting and harboring terrorism. The group is non-violent and anti-war.

“A lot of people have said in the past couple of weeks war has been a possibility,” he said. “What we have been trying to do is prevent it. If that argument had any validity at all it no longer does because we are at war. We are no longer trying to prevent it, but stop it.”