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Politics : Clinton -- doomed & wagging, Japan collapses, Y2K bug, etc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (7)	8/31/1998 2:48:00 PM
From: SOROS	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1151

Iran sends troops to Afghan border provoking fear of all out war By Julian West in Islamabad - The Electronic Telegraph - London - 08/29/98 - IRAN is preparing to mobilise 70,000 elite Revolutionary Guards on its border with Afghanistan, provoking fears of all-out war. The massive military build-up - the largest in the region since the Iran-Iraq war - follows several unheeded warnings from Teheran to the ruling Taliban militia. Iran has already stationed a preparatory force of 2,000 troops on the border opposite the western Afghan city of Herat, a Taliban stronghold. Teheran is angered by the failure of the Taliban - and Pakistan, which supports the militia - to return 10 of its diplomats and a reporter for the state-run radio. It claims that they were kidnapped when the Taliban seized the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif three weeks ago. The Taliban admit capturing 35 Iranian lorry drivers, but deny holding the diplomats. The Iranian military build-up, presented as a 15-day land and air exercise, will extend over 400 miles of Iranian territory near the Afghan frontier. Meanwhile, as tensions rise, Taliban jets have bombed independent forces from Iran, including anti-Taliban Afghans, who recently entered the western Afghan city of Sondan. Iran is Shia Muslim and has long opposed the Sunni Muslim Taliban. And since the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif, Teheran has indicated its willingness to help Afghanistan's minority Shia population by bolstering defences in one of the last two opposition strongholds, the Bamiyan valley deep in the Hindu Kush mountains. Iran has recently installed night flying lights and lengthened the dirt runway and Iranian transport airplanes have been ferrying supplies - most probably arms and ammunition - into the isolated valley under cover of darkness. Teheran had regular contact with the diplomats in its Mazar-i-Sharif consulate and said it possesses a tape-recorded telephone conversation with the consulate operator during which Taliban fighters entered the building and took the diplomats down into the basement. After that, the line was cut. Iran's consul in the Afghan city of Jelalabad has been allowed to visit the lorry drivers, but his attempts to locate the diplomats or discuss their release have failed. Teheran has also complained of little or no response from its appeals to Pakistan to intervene on its behalf. Leading the protests, former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said recently that "Iran will not leave this act unanswered". Asked if Iran would resort to force, the Intelligence Minister Qorban Najafabadi said: "We rule out no methods." While some analysts have described the Iranian military manoeuvres as "sabre-rattling", it is clear that the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif, which now gives the Taliban control of all but a tiny portion of Afghanistan, has provoked deep fears in Iran - many of them long-held. Iran has two million Shia Afghan refugees within its borders: a number they fear will now swell. They are also worried about the growing quantity of guns and drugs flowing into Iran from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and what the Iranian ambassador to Pakistan called "the anarchy that could spill over from Afghanistan". Iran is the main transhipment route to Western Europe for refined opium, which is the Taliban's principal source of income. Iranian border officers have been active in a partly British-funded project to control the heroin trade. But within Afghanistan, Iran is worried about its loss of influence and the fate of the minority Shia population. Reliable sources within Mazar-i-Sharif, which the Taliban have not allowed journalists to visit since its fall, say there appear to have been massacres in three minority areas of the city, with several hundred bodies left on the streets. In a radio interview on the BBC's Persian service, shortly after the fall of the city, the Taliban governor of the local province said the Taliban were conducting house to house searches for weapons and arresting people. Aid workers who visited the city told how they found the streets filled with corpses. Last September, when the Taliban last tried to take the city, 70 villagers were found slaughtered. Some had apparently been skinned, probably while they were still alive - a traditional method of torture among Pathans, the ethnic group from which the Taliban come.