US targets Taliban as protesters urge peace

WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD, Sept 30 (Reuters): While anti-war protesters chanted for peace, members of the US government made clear the target in Afghanistan is not just Islamic militant Osama Bin Laden, but also the Taliban rulers who shelter him.

US Congressmen meeting with Afghan opposition leaders in Rome promised to aid in rebuilding their nation if they helped topple the Taliban and get Bin Laden, the top suspect in Sept.

11 hijacking attacks that left more than 6,000 people feared dead in New York and Washington.

"I can tell you in Congress we know what you are doing and if you help us overthrow this Taliban tyranny and bring to justice Bin Laden, we will do right by you this time," Republican US Rep.

Dana Rohrabacher told the Afghans, who met with exiled former Afghanistan king Mohammad Zahir Shah to discuss his proposal for a grand council to resolve their countrys woes.

In Washington and several other cities around the world, anti-war protesters demonstrated against possible military action in the war on terrorism US president George W.

Bush declared after the attacks in which two hijacked jetliners leveled New Yorks World Trade Center, a third damaged the Pentagon near Washington and a fourth jet crashed in Western Pennsylvania.

"Like a lot of people here I want justice done, but I dont want to see the destruction of more innocent lives," said protester James Creedon, a rescue worker who left the rubble of the World Trade Center to join about 10,000 people demonstrating in the US capital.

"We dont want to see a hundred or a thousand more World Trade Centers in this country or abroad." Bush pinned the blame for the attacks on Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi-born fugitive, and demanded that the Taliban, a group of Islamic fundamentalists that has sheltered him for five years, turn the 44-year-old Bin Laden over or risk attack.

The Taliban has said it asked Bin Laden to leave, but that, according to local traditions of hospitality, he could stay as long as he wants.

The United States has deployed ships, troops and planes around Afghanistan, causing an exodus of people from its towns and cities.

Taliban fighters have prepared for war.

Yesterday, the White House released a photo of Bush huddled around a map of Afghanistan with his top advisers and cnn reported it had seen a White House memo supporting the overthrow of the Taliban, which has controlled most of war-fractured Afghanistan since 1996.

Bush, in his weekly radio address, stopped short of calling for the Talibans overthrow, but drew a distinction between the Afghan people and their rulers, saying: "We condemn the Taliban and welcome the support of other nations in isolating that regime." "We did not seek this conflict, but we will end it.

America will act deliberately and decisively, and the cause of freedom will prevail," Bush said.

US media have reported that elite US troops already were operating in the land-locked Central Asian nation and on a Gulf television station said some had been captured by Afghan security forces.

Refugee camp bleak end of road for Afghan widow JALOZAI REFUGEE CAMP (Pakistan), Sep 30 (Reuters) Noorbibi is sitting in her only possession, a donated tent in the middle of thousands of similar tattered tents in the poor neighbourhood of a rundown refugee camp.

The widow from Kabul is one of the rare few to cross into Pakistan in recent days, fleeing from war-ravaged Afghanistan ahead of anticipated US attacks if the ruling Taliban refuse to hand over Osama Bin Laden, prime suspect in the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Noorbibi is the head of an extended family of 21, including her three daughters, who used their life savings to take a bus close to the border and then paid smugglers to sneak them across.

The border has been closed by Pakistani officials who fear an influx of one million Afghan refugees, adding to more than two million already in the country including more than one million in North West Frontier Province, home to several camps like Jalozai.

But Noorbibi would not be stopped and would pay what it took to reach safety.

"We tried to cross twice but were turned back, then someone named Afridi took us across for 300 Rupees (4.60 Dollar) a person," she said.

"They threatened if we did not pay they would take us back." "We had to sell our belongings, everything we had," Noorbibi said, motioning around a bare tent that was filled with her daughters, half a dozen grandchildren and nothing else.

The part of the Jalozai camp in which Noorbibi is housed is filled with refugees who have fled over the past year to escape a devastating drought in Afghanistan.

It is visibly less well off than another part of the camp that was set up two decades ago on a dried-out riverbed to help refugees from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

"This is not a proper place, it is makeshift, it does not have proper water, proper sanitation," said Yusuf Hassan, regional affairs officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Jalozai is full of barefoot children running around with skin diseases, and there are freshly dug small graves in the cemetery on the edge of the sprawling camp.

There are no jobs, and many were just sitting in their tents like Noorbibi.

"We dont have food, we dont have a house," she said.

The old part of the camp now has mud huts, while the newer part is made up of fly-filled tents that give no protection against temperatures that can soar to 45 degrees celsuis (113 Fahrenheit) in the summer and slip below freezing in the winter.

There has been no rain and winds blow streams of dust through the camp.

Hassan said the next step would be to register Noorbibi and her family so they can be given food rations.

She said she has no idea what will happen to her family now, although eventually she would like to return to Kabul.

"If there are no problems, I would go back.

I need peace," she said.

Kuwait checks for "terrorist" bank accounts KUWAIT, Sep 30 (Reuters) Kuwait has stepped up efforts to control any possible flow of funds from the oil-rich state to extremist groups, ordering banks to freeze accounts by groups and individuals on a US blacklist.

"The Central Bank has sent us the list of 27, asking us to check accounts and freeze them if any of the 27 are found," a senior banker told Reuters today.

Washington last week listed 27 groups, charities and individuals which it believes may be associated with Saudi-born dissident Osama Bin Laden, the prime suspect in suicide attacks on September 11 on New York and Washington which left about 6,500 people dead or missing.

The Kuwait government is also checking operations by Muslim charities in the small state although some officials had said they were already following strict rules to avoid foul play.

Acting prime minister Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah met on Saturday with the heads of Kuwaits main charities to discuss the issue.

It was not immediately known if Kuwait plans to introduce further measures to audit their operations but some charities have welcomed such a move.

Kuwait, freed in 1991 of a seven-month Iraqi occupation by the US-led Gulf war, has strongly condemned the suicide attacks and assured Washington of support in its new war on "terrorism".

The Muslim conservative state hosts a variety of US warplanes, heavy military hardware in addition to some 5,000 troops, including ground forces.

Taliban seeks to determine if UK reporter a spy ISLAMABAD, Sep 30 (Reuters) Afghanistans ruling Taliban are investigating whether a British reporter for the Sunday Express who was arrested near the Eastern city of Jalalabad may be a spy, the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) said today.

Yvonne Ridley, 41, was dressed in the all enveloping Afghan Burqa, which flows almost to the ground and has a mesh over the eyes, when she was detained with her two guides near Jalalabad, about 15 km from the Pakistan border, AIP said.

The reporter was not carrying a passport and had entered the country illegally, AIP quoted an official in Jalalabad as saying.

The Taliban sent a special investigating team from Kabul to join the interrogation to determine whether Ridley was a reporter, AIP said.

"What we want to find out is whether this woman is really a journalist or working for some intelligence agency," AIP quoted a Taliban official as saying.

She wants to eat four or five times a day, she wants cigarettes and fresh clothes and we are providing everything to her," the Taliban official said.

"She is not detained in a room but in a house and walks around in the house and in the courtyard," he said.

An official at the Sunday Express newspaper in London has said that Ridley was working for the organisation.

Afghanistans ruling Taliban has asked all foreigners to leave the country and has said it will issue no visas to journalists.

US pursued secret efforts to catch or kill Bin Laden NEW YORK, Sep 30 (DPA) The Central Intelligence Agency secretly began to send teams of American officers to Northern Afghanistan about three years ago in an attempt to persuade the leader of the anti Taliban Afghan opposition to capture and perhaps kill Osama Bin Laden, according to the New York Times today.

The paper, citing American intelligence officials, said the covert effort, which has not been previously disclosed, was based on an attempt to work with Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was then the military leader of the largest anti-Taliban group in the northern mountains of Afghanistan, and to have his forces go after Bin Laden.

Massoud was himself fatally wounded only two days before the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and the CIA believes that he was assassinated by members of Bin Ladens organization, the Times report said.

The CIAs clandestine efforts to deal with Massoud were among the most sensitive and highly classified elements of a broader long-term campaign, continuing unsuccessfully through the end of the Clinton administration and into the Bush administration, to destroy Bin Ladens terrorist network.

The American campaign against Bin Laden intensified after the August 1998 bombings of two United States embassies in East Africa, which transformed the Saudi-born exile into Americas most wanted terrorist.

Today, the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and his lieutenants in Al Qaeda, the terrorist network he leads from his sanctuary in Afghanistan, has escalated to wartime levels.

The Times said the Bush administration is considering a full range of overt and covert military and intelligence proposals that Washington policy makers would have considered too risky or unworkable before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But according to current and former intelligence officials and other policy makers, the United States has been trying to kill Bin Laden and destroy Al Qaeda for years, as the terrorist organization has become more ruthless and ambitious in its efforts to attack American interests around the world.

British families flee London for fear of terrorist attacks LONDON, Sep 30 (DPA) An exodus of families from London has begun because of fears that the British capital is a prime target for a terrorist attack, according to a published report today.

The report in the Sunday Telegraph said many are leaving for the countryside or making plans to switch their children to the perceived safety of rural schools.

Some people with second homes are moving to them on a permanent basis, while others aim to relocate to the country once they sell their city properties.

Many more are preparing to move out of London in the event of a significant terrorist attack.

Britons living in America are also returning and heading for rural areas, the London newspaper reported.

One British family, who fled their home near New York city after the terrorist attacks, initially considered living in London but thought that too dangerous and instead moved to Cornwall last week.

The couples sons, aged seven and nine, have started at a new school in Truro.

The couple, who asked not to be identified, stand to lose 45,000 Dollars in relocation costs, but said the peace of mind from knowing they were safe made it worthwhile.

They decided to return to Britain even though the husband runs a consultancy firm employing 32 people and they had planned to live in America for at least two years.

They are now staying in their two-bedroom Holiday Home.

The 33-year-old man said: "We were terrified by the whole thing.

As soon as the politicians started talking about further attacks -possibly chemical or biological - we decided to come home." Frightened Afghans desert Eastern Jalalabad city PESHAWAR,(Pakistan), Sep 30 (Reuters) Afghans fearing attacks by the United States have deserted the eastern city of Jalalabad in the past two weeks, turning the once-bustling market city into a virtual ghost town.

Video footage of the city obtained by Reuters today showed closed shops, streets nearly empty in some parts of the city and houses locked and barred.

It was not known how many people had fled.

The United States bombarded sites near Jalalabad with Cruise missiles in August 1998 in a strike against suspected training camps belonging to Osama Bin Laden, whom Washington blamed for masterminding the bomb attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 220 people.

The United States has threatened to punish Afghanistan again if the ruling Taliban do not hand over Saudi-born Bin Laden, the main suspect behind the suicide plane attacks on New York and Washington nearly three weeks ago.

" People are worried about American attacks on Afghanistan so they have left," said Ahmad Anwar, a tailor in Jalalabad.

"People have been leaving for the past two weeks and now there is no work." The footage showed shuttered shop windows in Jalalabads gold market, as well as closed pharmacies.

Doors and windows of homes were closed and shuttered as residents joined an exodus of tens of thousands who have fled major cities across the country for rural or border areas in anticipation of US attacks.

"There is no business now and our financial condition is very bad," said Anwar.

"It is not a war on Osama Bin Laden, it is a war on all of Afghanistan." Except for the missile attacks, Jalalabad has mostly been a sleepy provincial city, about 70 km (43 miles) from the Khyber Pass border with Pakistan, since the Taliban seized control of it in September 1996.

In addition to housing some of the suspected training camps of Bin Laden, the area was also one of the bigger poppy-growing regions of Afghanistan, which until a devastating drought and a crackdown by the Taliban, had been by far the biggest exporter of opium in the world.

Those poppy fields have dried up, contributing to the number of refugees on the move in Afghanistan, and the video showed images of empty uncultivated fields as well or fields of abandoned, stunted crops.

"The living conditions here were already bad," said Mohammad Nasir, the district elder of Surkh road district just outside Jalalabad.

"We cant afford another war," he said, complaining about skyrocketing prices of essential goods.

"A 50-kg bag of wheat now costs 1,500 rupees, up from 900 before," he said.

One 12-member family, headed by a woman who lost her husband and son in the war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, had left the city and was living partly in the open in the countryside outside the city, the video showed.

Many families, their possessions loaded on to donkeys, were moving through the mountain passes toward Pakistan.

If the United States carries through with its threat to attack the Taliban for harbouring Bin Laden, Jalalabad could also be a target because of reports it is the site of several of his training camps or bases.

A Russian memo given to the UN Security Council listed several sites in Jalalabad as part of what it called the "terrorists infrastructure of Osama Bin Laden".

Evidence against Bin Laden undeniable: Blair BRIGHTON,(England), Sep 30 (Reuters) Prime minister Tony Blair said today he had seen "incontrovertible" evidence linking Osama Bin Laden to the attacks on the United States.

Britains premier praised the United States for not lashing out indiscriminately despite the loss of thousands of its citizens lives and warned Afghanistans ruling Taliban of dire consequences if it did not hand over Americas prime suspect.

"I have seen absolutely powerful, incontrovertible evidence," Blair told BBC Television from this Southern Coastal town where his Labour Party is about to open its annual conference amid unprecedented security.

The United States has blamed Bin Laden for masterminding deadly aerial attacks on New Yorks World Trade Center and the Pentagon near Washington on September 11 that killed more than 6,000 people.

Military retaliation is expected but many in a broad coalition of nations who have condemned the attacks want proof of Bin Ladens involvement to convince their publics of the justification for action.

A source close to the government said Blair would renew his diplomatic offensive later in the week, targeting countries that are strategically key to that coalition.

Blair said he wanted to make the evidence against Bin Laden clear but would be constrained by intelligence and security onsiderations.

The prime minister spoke to president George W.

Bush today and agreed that action was needed not for revenge but to stop further atrocities.

In the end the important thing is that we get him and stop him," Blair said.

"If they could have killed even more people then they would have." He praised Americas considered reaction and said even the first phase of action to find Bin Laden and close down his training camps in Afghanistan would take time.

"From the beginning they have tried to do the right thing, not the quickest thing." Blair said he did not know how much a war on terror would cost but warned against talking britain into recession.

Long-planned boosts to spending on health, education, crime and transport were affordable and "budgeted for", he said.

But he signalled that a protracted campaign against Bin Laden and his hosts the Taliban could hit government coffers.

US Congressmen pledge aid to Taliban foe ROME, Sept 30 (Reuters): US Congressmen promised to help rebuild Afghanistan if opposition forces worked with Washington to destroy the Taliban and capture terror suspect Osama Bin Laden.

A delegation of senior Congressmen flew to italy earlier in yesterday to meet the former king of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah, and tribal elders who have gathered in Rome to discuss the crisis that has enveloped their country.

"I can tell you in Congress we know what you are doing and if you help us to overthrow this Taliban tyranny and bring to justice Bin Laden we will do right by you this time," Congressman Dana Rohrabacher told a meeting of around 30 Afghan elders and military commanders.

A Californian republican, Rohrabacher said he could not speak on behalf of president George W Bush, but said he could speak for Congress.

"Congress will help you to rebuild your society," he told the meeting in a modest rome hotel, which included advisers of the king as well as members of the main Taliban opposition force, the northern alliance.

Afghan elders and military commanders met Zahir Shah earlier on Saturday as momentum appeared to build behind the monarchs call for a traditional grand assembly to resolve his countrys woes.

The ex-king, who has lived in exile in Italy since 1973, has become the focal point of diplomatic activity to find an alternative to the ostracized Taliban regime following the suicide attacks on the United States.

The 86-year old wants to convene a grand council of elders, a so-called Loya Jirga, to try to rally Afghanistans fractious tribes behind a government of national unity.

He was not present at Saturday nights meeting, but is due to see the 11-strong delegation of US politicians on Sunday.

Later in the day he is scheduled to hold talks with the Northern Alliance representatives, whose support will be needed if a grand council is to have genuine significance.

To get the Talibans foes to agree first to a loya jirga and then to a single government will require supreme diplomatic tact as the various factions nervously jockey for position.

Zahir Shahs advisers earlier on Saturday released a statement saying "a number of Afghan political and resistance personalities" had agreed on who should attend their proposed supreme council.

It also said they had decided to set up a military structure backed by resistance fighters, elders and professional army officers which would soon begin "activities" inside Afghanistan.

The statement angered the Northern Alliance, which draws support from minority ethnic groups in the north of the country which fear falling under the control of the ex-kings Pashtun majority.

"This was not our agreement, and this is not the path that we would be happy to pursue, without any discussions to announce something," Abdullah Abdullah, the northern alliance foreign minister, told reporters in Jabal Saraj, an alliance stronghold 45 miles (72 km) north of Kabul.

HIGH PROFILE Although he is old and frail, many diplomats believe Zahir Shah is probably the only figure with enough prestige to be able to galvanize his warring people behind a new administration.

Western politicians have beaten a path to his door in recent days as the U S prepares to punish the Taliban for giving sanctuary to Bin Laden the chief suspect behind the September 11 strikes on New York and Washington.

The Northern Alliance has taken umbrage at all the attention paid to him and a spokesman for the group said in Islamabad on Saturday that any attempts by Western powers to restore Zahir Shah to the throne would provoke further turmoil.

However, the ex-king has constantly stressed that he has no personal ambitions to regain his crown, saying it is up to impoverished Afghanistan to decide what leader it wants.

The Afghan leaders who met rohrabacher asked the United States to tell Afghanistans influential neighbour, Pakistan, to stop "interfering" in their domestic affairs.

Zahir Shah ascended to the throne in 1933 after his father was assassinated and oversaw 40 years of stability and cautious modernization before he was ousted in a bloodless coup led by his brother-in-law.

The bookish monarch now lives in a remote, leafy villa in the northern outskirts of Rome.

Mullah Mohammad Omar, the reclusive spiritual leader of the Taliban, was quoted in a rare interview on Saturday as saying that the former king had no role to play in the country.

"He is too old and weak...Anyway, Afghanistan does not have a leadership vacuum...With the grace of God the future of the Taliban shall be bright," he told the conservative Iranian newspaper Entekhab.

Saudi Arabia not to allow US to use land bases DUBAI,Sep 30 (DPA) The government of Saudi Arabia will not to allow the United States to use bases on its territory to launch military strikes against another Moslem country, but will permit US warplanes to use its air space, a Saudi newspaper reported today.

The newspaper Okaz quoted defence minister Prince Sultan as saying, "We do not accept the presence in our land of even one soldier at war with Moslems or Arabs." Okaz also quoted a senior military Saudi official as brushing aside media reports suggesting that Saudi Arabia will allow US warplanes to use Prince Sultan air base, south of the capital Riyadh, to strike Afghanistan.

Prince Sultan said that reports suggesting otherwise were "nonsense".

But Prince Sultan, whose country is Washingtons most important ally in the region, said that the kingdom will let the United States use Saudi air space, implying that US.

Planes could fly over Saudi Arabia to carry out military operations.

The US has several military aircraft at Prince Sultan air base, near the Saudi capital Riyadh.

Washington has threatened to attack Afghanistan where the Saudi-born Osama Bin Laden, suspected to be the mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks against the US, resides as a "guest" of the ruling ultra-orthodox Islamic Taliban militia.

Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam, does not want to enrage its Moslem population by letting the US attack another Moslem country.

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