Afghan Leader Returns to New Clashes

Sat Feb 2, 9:02 AM ET

By Sayed Salahuddin and Anton Ferreira

KABUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai returned home to an increasingly perilous security situation as President Bush issued his third warning in a week to Iraq, Iran and North Korea whom he accuses of seeking nuclear, germ or chemical weapons.

The fate of the Wall Street Journal's American reporter Daniel Pearl, believed kidnapped by Muslim militants in Pakistan demanding the release of prisoners from the Afghan war, remained unclear and police said they had no idea where he was.

While U.S. forces have all but destroyed Afghan operations of the al Qaeda network of fugitive militant Osama bin Laden, blamed for the September 11 attacks on America, simmering Afghan tribal rivalry has exploded in bloodshed in recent days.

In the east, forces led by a government-appointed provincial chief were vowing to counter-attack the town of Gardez, from where they were forced on Friday after two days of fierce battles with rival Pashtun tribal troops, residents in the area said.

In the north, rival ethnic minority forces clashed and some 40 people had been killed, a faction official said.

Returning from visits to the United States and Britain, where he pleaded for a bigger international security force, Karzai was expected to travel soon to Herat in the west where the forces of rival ethnic groups have been rattling sabres in recent weeks, officials in Kabul said on Saturday.

Karzai took office as head of the six-month U.N.-backed administration on December 22 following the defeat of the former ruling Taliban.

Saudi Arabia's former intelligence chief said he believed Saudi-born bin Laden, who for years was protected in Afghanistan by the Taliban, was still alive.

"I believe bin Laden now is on the run, he is not dead," Saudi Prince Turki al Faisal, who retired last year, said in a CNN interview.

"A person on the run mainly thinks about his own life and probably is not communicating with his operatives but perhaps there may be other bin Laden supporters who may or may not be in Afghanistan who are taking over now and issuing the orders."

CONFLICTING MESSAGES ON REPORTER

Pakistani police in the southern port city of Karachi, where U.S. journalist Pearl was abducted on January 23, said they had hunted all night, but had yet to find him or determine the authenticity of conflicting claims over his fate.

One email message purportedly from his captors said he had been killed, but an anonymous caller to the U.S. consulate in Karachi on Friday demanded the release of a top Taliban prisoner from U.S. custody and $2 million within 36 hours for him.

The police search was concentrated on graveyards in Karachi after an email message sent to news organizations said the reporter had been executed and his body dumped in a cemetery.

"We've searched most of the graveyards in the city throughout the night but nothing was found," said a police official.

A group claiming to hold Pearl has sent a number of emails threatening to kill him and demanding the release of Pakistani prisoners captured by U.S. forces during the Afghan war.

Pearl, 38, disappeared in Karachi while working on a story about alleged shoe-bomber Richard Reid and trying to contact radical Islamic groups.

BLUNT BUSH

Bush, planning the biggest U.S. military buildup since the Cold War, first condemned Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the "axis of evil" in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. He threatened the countries again on Thursday and returned to the theme on Friday at a meeting of his Republican Party.

"People say, 'What are the consequences?' They will find out in due course if they can't get their house in order. The mighty United States will do whatever it takes to defend our security."

"Make no mistake about it, if you threaten us with weapons of mass destruction, if you threaten our allies and friends with weapons of mass destruction, we will do whatever it takes to protect our people," Bush said.

North Korea said Bush's comments were little short of declaring war and accused his administration of "political immaturity and moral leprosy." In Iran, influential cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati called Bush a "bloodthirsty maniac."

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov restated Moscow's insistence that the U.S.-led war on terrorism in Afghanistan must not be extended to other countries.

Secretary of State Colin Powell softened the U.S. line at the annual World Economic Forum being held in New York, urging global leaders to fight terrorism by waging war on poverty.

"We have to go after poverty, we have to go after despair, we have to go after hopelessness," Powell said at the gathering just 3 miles (five km) from the ruins of the World Trade Center.

The controversy over Bush's blunt rhetoric followed a storm stirred among human rights groups and some U.S. allies over U.S. treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban captives being held in Afghanistan and a navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In Manila, Philippine Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes, citing arrests of al Qaeda suspects in his country, Singapore and Malaysia, said the network was infiltrating Southeast Asia.

"The al Qaeda network is trying to worm its way into the region. And so we have to prepare for that," Reyes told Philippines television channel ANC.

U.S. troops are training forces hunting Abu Sayyaf Islamic rebels in the southern Philippines. Washington has linked Abu Sayyaf to al Qaeda.