WASHINGTON/KABUL, 12 January — A plane carrying the first group of prisoners from the war in Afghanistan arrived at the US naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, yesterday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said.

Thousands of Afghan troops left Kabul yesterday as US soldiers said they had been attacked at an air base in southern Afghanistan minutes after a plane took off with a first batch of prisoners bound for Cuba. And with warlords and bandits setting up fiefdoms across Afghanistan, US troops began disarming local militia yesterday.

Also yesterday, US warplanes returned to pound targets in the Khost region of eastern Afghanistan where Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network ran a guerrilla training base, a Pakistan-based news agency said. But the whereabouts of Bin Laden and his one-time protector, Taleban supreme leader Mulla Omar, remained a mystery.

In Washington, President George W. Bush warned Iran against harboring members of Al-Qaeda network who fled Afghanistan and cautioned Iran not to challenge the new Afghan interim government. US troops began disarming ragtag militia fighters in the town of Spin Boldak on the Pakistani border, witnesses said.

"The first group of Al-Qaeda and Taleban detainees are arriving or have arrived at a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba," Rumsfeld told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. "The first plane with 20 detainees arrived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba," confirmed Myers.

US bombers were in action again above a sprawling complex of former Mujahedeen bases at Zhawar Killi, which they began bombarding earlier this week after claims Taleban or Al-Qaeda forces were trying to regroup there. The Afghan Islamic Press said the bombing was so intense, Pakistani villagers on the other side of the nearby border fled their homes.

Meanwhile, the Northern Alliance troops who have occupied the Afghan capital since taking it from the Taleban regime two months ago were leaving the city under the orders of the country’s new power-sharing interim government. "Around five or six thousand soldiers have left Kabul. More will leave in a week," Gen. Din Muhammad Jurhat, the Interior Ministry’s senior security official in Kabul, told AFP.

The withdrawal was welcomed by the commanders of a British-led international security force.