SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan, 19 March 2003 — US planes scattered thousands of leaflets over southern Afghanistan yesterday, appealing for help in the hunt for Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. Residents in the southern Afghan border town of Spin Boldak said they heard planes flying overhead during the night and awoke to find thousands of leaflets fluttering across the dusty landscape. In the leaflets, fugitive Taleban leader Mulla Muhammad Omar, whose regime sheltered Osama for years, is shown as a dog, with Osama holding him by a leash. “Who is the real architect of the Taleban?” the leaflets read in the local Pashto and Persian languages.
On Sunday, posters appeared more than 800 km away in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. They showed pictures of around a dozen senior Taleban and Al-Qaeda figures and offered a reward for information. Despite a $25 million bounty on their heads, Osama and Omar have managed to evade capture since disappearing in late 2001 after the fall of the Taleban to US-backed opposition groups.
Earlier, the US military said war in Iraq would not slow its hunt for Osama or remnants of the Taleban but it may fuel increased attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan. “Negative,” US military spokesman Col. Roger King said when asked if war would change operations in Afghanistan. “There is no deadline in Afghanistan, we’ve got the resources and troops to continue our mission and we plan to continue our mission,” he told a news briefing at the US headquarters at Bagram, north of Kabul.
Meanwhile, three people were killed and one injured when rival commanders in the violence-plagued north clashed over possession of a flock of 250 sheep, officials said yesterday. According to United Nations officials in the northern capital of Mazar-e-Sharif, the fighting Saturday in Sar-e-Pul province’s Laty village was the latest spat between troops loyal to allied warlords who control the area.
“I can confirm the clash between Junbish and Jamiat which left three people dead and one more injured, but I have no information about the cause of this conflict,” UN political officer Omar Safi told AFP in Mazar-e-Sharif. Although regional strongmen Atta Muhammad and Abdul Rashid Dostum — who respectively head up the local Jamiat and Junbish political parties — jointly rule the north, their armies regularly lock horns.
