WASHINGTON/KABUL, 7 January — US warplanes bombed eastern Afghanistan in pursuit of fugitive Taleban leader Mulla Muhammad Omar and his ally Osama Bin Laden and the country’s new leader said yesterday he was determined to arrest the cleric. US bombers pounded hills near the eastern city of Jalalabad in a bid to wipe out Al-Qaeda holdouts. Also yesterday, the US forces were questioning Abdul Salam Zaeef, the toppled Taleban regime’s former ambassador to Pakistan, for information on Taleban leaders, officials said.
In the first airstrikes of 2002 against suspected Al-Qaeda positions in eastern Afghanistan, waves of US bombers struck at the White Mountains south of Jalalabad overnight, the Afghan Islamic Press reported yesterday. "They launched at least six attacks on the hills on suspicion that Al-Qaeda fighters were hiding there," it said.
The chairman of Afghanistan’s interim administration, Hamid Karzai, said Omar was still at large. Asked by journalists during a visit to a Kabul orphanage where Omar was, Karzai replied: "I don’t know, we are looking for him, we will arrest him." The Pakistan-based AIP said US aircraft had bombed several targets in eastern Afghanistan’s Spinghar mountain range during the night, flying at least six sorties over the area.
The US jets were targeting the remnants of Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, blamed by the United States for the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington and sheltered by Omar’s Taleban militia. The report could not be independently confirmed and there was no word of casualties.
French troops securing Kabul’s battle-scarred international airport said its crater-filled runway should be clear of mines and ready for jumbo jets to land within 10 days, after explosives experts had spent three days checking the terminal building for mines and booby traps before starting work.
The Baghran region to the north of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, an area long defiant of the rule of the center, also appeared to be coming under government control after reports Omar had fled the district on a motorcycle. Even during the 1996-2001 rule of the Taleban, which imposed its stringent interpretation of Islam on most of the country, remote and mountainous Baghran held out, with heavily armed local chieftains retaining considerable independence.
One was Rayees-e-Baghran, in effective control of Baghran and the surrounding region. As suspicions rose that Omar was hiding in his fiefdom — a charge denied by locals who say he has no support in the area and is blamed for a litany of suffering — Rayees-e-Baghran has started cooperating with local authorities.
Following a three-day trip by the pro-Karzai governor of Helmand Province, Mulla Sher Muhammad Akhandzada, and apparently fearing possible attacks by the United States, he agreed to hand over a huge stockpile of weapons. "The people from Baghran gave back their weapons and ammunition, and we recovered almost 200 tons of ammunition and some 80 or 90 big weapons," a spokesman for the governor of a neighboring province told Reuters near Rayees-e-Baghran’s heartland on Saturday.
Akhandzada’s delegation returned convinced Omar was not in Baghran, but the deputy police chief of Kandahar province, next door to Helmand, said he thought he was in the area.
