WASHINGTON/KABUL, 9 January — Three former ministers of the ousted Taleban government surrendered but the US-led hunt for Osama Bin Laden and Taleban chief Mulla Muhammad Omar entered its fourth month with the trail growing cold. British Prime Minister Tony Blair left Afghanistan early today vowing the world would help rebuild the shattered country.
The new Afghan government said, however, Bin Laden and Omar were believed still in the country. "It is most likely they are in Afghanistan," said Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. In a reminder that Bin Laden and other leaders of the Al-Qaeda network might never be taken alive, a Sudanese fighter blew himself up while trying to escape from a hospital in the southern city of Kandahar.
The UN World Food Program started aid operations yesterday in the western city of Herat for the first time since September, providing enough food to feed 340,000 people for a month in the city and 324,000 in the nearby Maslakh refugee camp. But the WFP warned that hundreds of thousands more were desperately hungry around Kandahar and other areas because it was too dangerous for aid agencies to go there.
The first 70 German troops to join the British-led international security force left yesterday for Kabul, first flying west to pick up Dutch soldiers. So far a force of fewer than 5,000 foreign soldiers is envisaged. But interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai said yesterday he might ask foreign governments to provide more.
"The delegations that I receive ... keep asking for a larger number of international security forces and to be deployed in other provinces, other cities of Afghanistan," he told the BBC. "As need arises, we might ask for that."
A spokesman for Kandahar Gov. Gul Agha said the ousted ministers of defense, justice and mines and industry had given themselves up to authorities in Kandahar, the Taleban’s former southern stronghold. "Ministers of the Taleban and senior Taleban are coming one by one and surrendering and joining with us," he said. "Among those who surrendered were former Minister of Defense Mulla Ubai Dullah, Minister of Justice Mulla Turabi and Minister of Mines and Industry, Mulla Saadudin," he said.
Separately, an Afghan tribal commander said the head of the militia’s information department and one of their senior spokesmen, Abdul Hayee Motmaein, had been detained and handed over to US forces.
But the whereabouts of Bin Laden and his ally Mulla Omar remained a mystery. A military spokesman said US forces were going to stop "chasing the shadows" of Bin Laden and Omar, and focus on eradicating remaining pockets of Al-Qaeda resistance.
US aircraft dropped pamphlets over eastern Afghanistan yesterday warning people not to shelter members of the Taleban and the Al-Qaeda network or risk being bombed, the Pakistan-based news agency Afghan Islamic Press said.
US officials had raised hopes that Omar might be captured over the weekend as anti-Taleban forces negotiated with tribal chiefs in Baghran, northwest of Kandahar, for the surrender of fighters thought to be protecting him. The body of the Sudanese Al-Qaeda fighter was found in a garden outside a ward in a Kandahar hospital where he and several other wounded fighters, mostly Arabs, had been holed up with weapons since early December.
It was unclear how many of the fighters were left barricaded in the ward. "Nobody can get near them," a local official said. "Everybody is afraid they will explode something."
A poll found that 60 percent of Americans believed the war would not be won until Bin Laden was found. A US military official said sweeps of Tora Bora caves in eastern Afghanistan had found evidence Bin Laden had been there, but it was unclear how recently.
Afghan tribal leaders have protested at the continuing killings of Afghan civilians in American air raids but US officials say the bombing will continue until the Taleban and Al-Qaeda are destroyed. Karzai said yesterday Afghanistan would not ask the United States to stop bombing until the manhunt had been completed. The Organization of Islamic Conference demanded a probe into the "massacre of prisoners of war who had surrendered to Northern Alliance forces, following assurances that they will be well treated and handed over to the UN."
