Afghan Taliban Gear Up, Crack Down Before Attacks
Posted Monday, September 24 2001 @ 22:55:01 MEST
Reuters
September 24, 2001 02:19 PM ET
By Tom Heneghan
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - Afghanistan's hard-line Taliban geared up for threatened U.S. attacks Monday by mobilizing troops, seizing U.N. food stocks and appealing to the American people to avert a "vain and bloody war."
But their chief spokesman insisted the isolated leadership would still not hand over Osama bin Laden unless Washington, which blames him for the devastating September 11 suicide plane attacks in the United States, provides evidence.
The 44-year-old Saudi-born fugitive in a rare message sent to al-Jazeera television in Qatar, urged Pakistanis to bar U.S. troops from using their country as a springboard for "the new Jewish crusader campaign led by the biggest crusader (President George W.) Bush." But the Taliban are already fighting in the north where they have been waging a long-running civil war, and admitted losing Zari, a town 60 miles south of Mazar-i-Sharif, to Northern Alliance forces advancing on the strategic city.
Further resistance came from Ismail Khan, the opposition commander who was once governor of Herat, who said he was rallying up to 7,000 men to win back the western Afghan city from the Taliban, whose forces he said were badly equipped and crumbling under the threat of all-out war.
In a message relayed simultaneously in Kabul, Islamabad and the Gulf, Taliban officials said they were reinforcing their army by mobilizing an additional 300,000 men -- a figure Pakistani experts on Afghanistan consider improbable.
"In view of the current conditions, 300,000 well-experienced and equipped men have been stationed in the center (of the country), at borders and other significant areas in addition to its former detachments," Defense Minister Mullah Obaidullah said in a statement sent to Reuters in Kabul.
SIZE MATTERS
He did not reveal the actual size of the army, but a leading Afghan analyst in Pakistan, Ahmed Rashid, said it could not be more than about 45,000 and might be depleted by desertions.
"They have about 25,000 fighting in the north and about another 20,000 in the south," he told Reuters. "They can forcibly conscript young men, but you're only talking about 10,000 or 15,000."
Mullah Mohammad Omar, the reclusive spiritual leader of the hard-line Islamic movement, warned Washington it could not win its "war on terrorism" by killing bin Laden and urged it to change its Middle East policies or face a "vain and bloody war."
"America should not mislead itself. It cannot emerge from this crisis by the murder of myself and Osama bin Laden," said a statement issued by his office in the southern city of Kandahar.
"If America wants terrorism to end, it should withdraw its forces from the Gulf and end its partisanship in Palestine," said Mullah Omar, who has sheltered bin Laden since 1996.
Washington wants bin Laden "dead or alive" for what it sees as his guiding hand in the suicide plane attacks.
"If America does not take the above-mentioned steps, it will be involved in a vain and bloody war ... and it will burn itself and others," Mullah Omar's statement said.
It appeared Mullah Omar was engaged in delicate political maneuvering to try to stave off attack by the world's mightiest army without being seen by his followers -- and the rest of the Muslim world -- to be abandoning bin Laden.
Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, Kabul's only remaining foreign envoy since the United Arab Emirates suspended diplomatic links Saturday, sent a diplomatic message to ordinary Americans.
"The sympathetic people of the United States, during the Soviet occupation, assisted us in an unprecedented manner and we still appreciate that assistance," he told a news conference at his embassy in the Pakistan capital.
"Unfortunately the government of the United States is threatening the people of Afghanistan. We are calling on the people of America ... to alert the authorities to the grave consequences ... and to save the people of Afghanistan and America from those consequences."
TALIBAN CRACK DOWN ON U.N.
In Kandahar, the Taliban seized 1,400 tons of food from the World Food Program (WFP) and shut down the U.N. agency's offices, a WFP spokesman in Islamabad said.
The United Nations said the Taliban had closed down its offices and those of some private relief groups in Kandahar and locked up U.N. communications equipment in Kabul at the weekend.
Still missing, the Taliban said, was the world's most wanted man.
They are trying to hand to their long-time "guest" the verdict of clerics who demanded last week that he leave of his own free will and in his own time ahead of U.S. retaliation, said Abdul Hai Mutmaen, the Taliban's chief spokesman.
Even if bin Laden was found, the Taliban would not hand him over without proof of his guilt in the attacks this month in the United States that killed nearly 7,000, Mutmaen told Reuters from his leader's base in the southern city of Kandarhar.
"It is not permissible to send him against his will. When we find him we will deliver the verdict and it is entirely up to him whether he wants to go or stay, but so far we have failed to track him down," he said.
"We rule out the possibility of his handover to America without substantial evidence." |
