January 21, 2002

US aid organisation seeks volunteers for mission to Kabul Monday January 21, 10:20 PM

A US aid organisation is seeking help from Singaporeans to feed the people of post-Taliban Afghanistan.

A Singaporean staff member has just returned from a 2-week mission there, and said the organisation wants to send a team of medical professionals to Kabul this March, and is looking for local volunteers.

Kumar Periasamy has spent 17 years helping in countries like Iraq and Tajikistan, yet he was not quite prepared for the poverty he saw in Afghanistan's capital Kabul, which he visited earlier this month.

With many men still missing in action in Afghanistan, boys as young as 8 work to provide for their families,

and widows roam the streets begging for alms and food.

Operation Blessing International - the US-mission he worked with - distributed food rations to 13 villages and more than 500 widows, many of whom walked miles to collect the food.

The mission also distributed textbooks to Kabul's first co-ed school.

But with limited funds, every mouth he fed meant another was left empty.

Kumar said, "The basic need right now is 2 things - food items, because they don't have any kind of food. And warm clothing. Blankets is the main thing, because it's so cold right now, electricity is cut off like 14 hours a day, so people can't afford any heating system like kerosene or wood..."

He is in talks with Singapore's Touch Community Services to see how it can help get volunteers and funds for his next mission to Kabul in March.

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Warlords jeopardise Afghan reconstruction
Monday January 21, 8:55 PM

Reports of fighting between rival warlords in Afghanistan's north could not have come at a worse time for interim leader Hamid Karzai as he tries to muster international aid to rebuild his shattered nation.

The Afghan Islamic Press said the militia forces of ethnic Uzbek chief Abdul Rashid Dostam and a rival ethnic Tajik commander, probably Mohammad Daoud, had been fighting since Sunday over a remote district near the Tajikistan border.

While the report has not been independently confirmed, it highlights the precarious peace that exists between Afghanistan's tribal chiefs and warlords as they compete to fill the power vacuum left by the defeated Taliban.

The report is also likely to be noted with concern in Tokyo, where Karzai on Monday addressed delegates from more than 50 donor contries at a conference on the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

Almost four billion dollars was pledged over the next five years, with the final figure for 2002 alone looking set to match or beat the 1.3 billion dollars needed to cover immediate costs.

"But the true test, of course, is... whether we will make good on those pledges, whether we provide the aid that is desperately needed right now, and whether we stay engaged for the long haul," warned UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who is attending the two-day meeting.

The key to turning the pledges into hard cash will be maintaining the peace in Afghanistan so the massive task of rebuilding the country after more than 20 years of war can begin, analysts said.

"Unless the Afghans can unify, the international community will not move on the reconstruction front," said Islamabad-based analyst Rifaat Hussain, chairman of Quaid-i-Azam University's department of defence and strategic studies.

"If there is continued fighting then the international community will just walk," he said, adding that he supported Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's repeated calls for a stronger foreign security force in Afghanistan.

Dostam and Daoud are both members of rival factions of the Northern Alliance which dominates Karzai's government. It is hoped the UN-backed administration with a six-month mandate will be followed by a broad-based, multi-ethnic government.

Uzbek warlord Dostam, who controls the main northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif, was made deputy defence minister in Karzai's administration only after he protested bitterly about being left out of the inter-Afghan talks in Bonn which decided on the make-up of the interim cabinet.

Elsewhere around the country, other warlords have also expressed dissent and are ruling their respective territories regardless of the new central authority in Kabul.

Ismail Khan controls the western city of Herat, Haji Abdul Qadir has the eastern city of Jalalabad and Gul Agha is in charge of the Taliban's former stronghold of Kandahar in the south. The extent of Karzai's influence in these major cities is unclear at best.

Analysts point out that the situation in Afghanistan is now similar to the post-Soviet era in the early 1990s, when "warlordism" held the country hostage and the power of the government in Kabul was severely limited.

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Donors pledge over three billion dollars for Afghanistan
Monday January 21, 8:29 PM AFP

World leaders pledged more than three billion dollars at an international conference here to help pull Afghanistan out of the dark years of rubble, famine and misery.

Interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai, seeking to rebuild his country from scratch after two decades of war and the misrule of the Taliban, issued an emotional appeal for help to delegates from more than 50 countries.

"I'm here as the citizen of a country that has had nothing but disasters, war, brutality and depravation for so many years," he said at the start of the two-day gathering in Tokyo.

"Please recognise that what you see here is not what you see in Afghanistan," he told delegates including US Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

"We are nicely dressed, we have eaten a good breakfast this morning... but ladies and gentleman remember that there are in Afghanistan millions of people who are unable to go to basic school, find a treatment for some minor illness, forced to travel with relatives on incredibly bad roads... and that many people are not well fed because of drought and war."

Karzai also urged the world to forgive debts run up by Afghanistan's previous regimes, including the Taliban before the fundamentalist militia's forced departure last month, to boost his cash-starved administration.

The gathering was first mooted by the Japanese government a month after the September 11 attacks on the United States, as US-led forces began bombarding the Taliban in a campaign that led to Karzai taking over last month.

In a bid to stop Afghanistan lurching back to the post-Soviet chaos that turned it into a breeding ground for extremism and a safe haven for the al-Qaeda network of chief terror suspect Osama bin Laden, donors promised to give a total of 3.083 billion dollars over the next five years.

The final figure for 2002 alone looked set to match or beat the 1.3 billion dollars that, according to Annan, Afghanistan needs "right now to cover its immediate needs".

"But the true test, of course, is ... whether we will make good on those pledges, whether we provide the aid that is desperately needed right now, and whether we stay engaged for the long haul," the UN chief added.

Despite the ringing declarations of support, the pledges must yet be turned into hard cash. Afghans will be wary of the international community losing sight of their crippling problems as the collective gaze shifts elsewhere in the months and years ahead.

Powell assured Karzai and his delegation that "the American people are with you in the long-term," as he announced Washington's contribution of 296.75 million dollars in the coming year.

"The United States will not abandon the people of Afghanistan and we in the international community must not fail them," Powell said.

Conference hosts Japan pledged 250 million dollars this year and up to 500 million dollars over the next two and a half years.

Britain said it would donate more than 200 million pounds (288 million dollars) over five years in addition to a contribution from the EU, and Germany said it would give 320 million euros in the next four years.

Saudi Arabia, one of the co-chairs of the meeting alongside Japan, the US and EU, pledged 220 million dollars over three years.

"We are much more satisfied than we were when we arrived. We can begin to be optimistic," Torek R. Farhadi, the economic adviser to the Afghan interim government, told AFP.

The European Union said it was giving the most with a contribution of 550 million euros (495 million dollars) for this year, rising to one billion euros over the next five years depending on member states' contributions.

Europe would also show its long-term commitment to the Afghan people by opening a representative office in Kabul next month, said External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten said.

"We must not lose sight of our objective -- to build a better Afghanistan, an Afghanistan free from terror, social injustice and exclusion, and warlordism," Patten said.

Over the decades of Soviet occupation, Taliban rule and warlord infighting, Afghanistan's infrastructure has been ravaged with schools, hospitals and telecommunications destroyed.

Millions of the country's 16 million people have become refugees, escaping fighting, drought and poverty.

The World Bank and Asian Development Bank each promised 500 million dollars over two and a half years. The lending agencies contributed to a pre-conference study which estimated Afghanistan's reconstruction needs over the next decade would reach 15 billion dollars

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Omar's driver describes narrow escape from U.S. bombs By Raz Mohammad
Monday January 21, 5:57 PM

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The leader of Afghanistan's Taliban movement, Mullah Mohammad Omar, survived a direct U.S. missile strike on his home and fled with his second wife in a taxi, the fugitive's driver said on Monday.

He escaped a second, pinpoint attack on the cab a little more than an hour later.

"The missile struck and all of (Omar's) family ran outside in panic, and Mullah Omar asked me to get a taxi," Mohammed Rahim, 35, told Reuters.

Mullah Omar and his ally Saudi-born Osama bin Laden top Washington's most wanted list. Their whereabouts are not known.

The leader of the strict Islamic movement which ruled Afghanistan for six years got into Rahim's vehicle along with his second wife and a number of his children.

"I was really scared. He told me to go to Sangisar. This was at night -- the missile hit the house at 8:55 p.m. (1625 GMT)," Rahim said.

The journey took about an hour. Sangisar is in Maiwand district, west of Kandahar.

Other associates of the Taliban leader have said Mullah Omar fled the night before the first U.S. bombing directed at his homes -- one in Kandahar city, the other on western outskirts.

Rahim said he was not sure about the casualties in the attack on the larger and newer house, but he had heard that Mullah Omar's stepfather, who is also his uncle, had been killed.

Residents fleeing Kandahar said at the time that Mullah Omar's 10-year-old son was also killed in the airstrike on his house in Sangisar.

TAXI DESTROYED

The taxi belonged to Rahim. He said Omar did not want to use one of his own vehicles -- including black Lexus saloons and a white Toyota Land Cruiser with tinted windows -- because they might be conspicuous.

Even so, minutes after arrival at Sangisar, Rahim's taxi was blown to pieces by another U.S. projectile. It was a second narrow escape for Mullah Omar.

By that time, everyone was out of the car. Omar and his second wife and children had hurried off on foot in the direction of the home of the second wife's father.

Rahim said he ran off in another direction. The village was not damaged in the U.S. attack, he said. It was a pinpoint strike on the taxi.

That was the last Rahim saw of Mullah Omar. The driver stayed a week in Sangisar and then returned to Kandahar.

Other reports, from servants and warlords, say Mullah Omar later returned alone to the southern city, the Taliban's last bastion, and could be seen on the back of a motorcycle with a Kalashnikov rifle, moving from place to place.

As the Taliban stronghold fell -- battered by U.S. bombers and besieged by anti-Taliban forces on the ground -- Mullah Omar slipped away in the night and is still on the run.

Bin Laden has also vanished. The United States has pledged to track him down for his alleged role in the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people.

"A GOOD PERSON"

Rahim said he first met Mullah Omar in Sangisar, possibly in 1994 as the fundamentalist movement took shape.

He joined the Taliban as a driver. He said he supported the organisation because it was taking action against looters and armed robbers infesting roads and towns throughout the south.

"Mullah Omar was generally good to those who worked for him -- in my opinion, he was a good person. He didn't say anything bad to anyone that I know of," Rahim said.

Rahim earned three million afghanis (about $150) a month, twice the going rate for the job.

Before September 11, Mullah Omar spent much of his time at shrines and cemeteries of the martyred -- those killed in war against the Taliban's enemies.

"He wasn't going out much after the September 11 incident," Rahim said.

Mullah Omar had one passion -- wrestling.

In Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan, it takes the form of a traditional sport in which men, stripped to the waist, grab each other with both arms around the ribs, hands locked together, and try to throw their opponent to the ground.

It was one of the few recreations the Taliban did not ban -- unlike listening to the radio, playing music, dancing, singing or watching television.

"He used to go a lot to the gheijj (Pashtun wrestling), and he was really fond of it," Rahim said.

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As Afghan aid pledges roll in, anti-terror campaign continues
Monday January 21, 4:07 PM AFP

As world leaders pledged more than three billion dollars to rebuild war-torn Afghanistan, police, spy agencies and military worldwide continued to track down members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.

Pakistani security officials said seven suspects -- a British Arab, a Saudi, a Yemeni, two Afghans and two Pakistanis -- were being interrogated by a joint team of Pakistani and US agencies at a secure detention center outside Lahore.

Afghan police working for the interim government arrested six alleged al-Qaeda members late Friday, and on Saturday Spanish police arrested two more suspects near Barcelona.

The latest arrests in Spain came just days after British anti-terrorist police arrested 17 people linked to what they said was an al-Qaeda cell based in the central English city of Leicester.

The Swedish Foreign Ministry announced that the United States had arrested a Swedish national in Afghanistan suspected of being a member of bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.

The Swede, whose identity was not disclosed, has been taken to the US military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, Foreign Ministry spokesman Goesta Grassman told AFP.

A German commission of inquiry set up following the September 11 attacks on the United States has asked 140 mostly foreign students here to report for questioning, the daily Hamburger Abendblatt reported.

Some 110 suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan have been transferred to the US naval base, where they are being held as "unlawful combatants" in a high-security compound.

In a rare display of cooperation with the United States, Cuba's number two leader, Raul Castro, said that Cuban authorities had been given standing orders to return any Taliban or al-Qaeda prisoner who might escape the US base at Guantanamo Bay.

The best known of the prisoners taken in Afghanistan, 20-year-old US citizen and Taliban volunteer John Walker Lindh, will be brought to America "in the immediate future" to face trial in a civilian court, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said.

Meeting in Tokyo in a bid to stop Afghanistan lurching back to chaos, Japan the United States and Europe promised to give a total of 1.04 billion dollars in 2002, and more in the years ahead.

The total figure for 2002 looked set to match or beat the total of 1.3 billion dollars that, according to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Afghanistan needs "right now to cover its immediate needs".

Other countries and agencies pledged money over a longer time frame for a total of 3.083 billion dollars promised in Tokyo so far.

But interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai also urged international donors to take action on the ground to help his country, which after two decades of war now has a fighting chance of peace.

Hundreds of US troops are still in Afghanistan trying to root out bin Laden supporters.

Two US Marines were killed and five injured when a CH-53E Super Stallion heavy-lift helicopter carrying seven people crashed 30 minutes after leaving an airbase in Bagram, 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Kabul on a mission to resupply troops.

Elsewhere Iraqi President Saddam Hussein chaired a leadership meeting to examine ways of thwarting any US military offensive against Iraq, the official INA news agency reported.

A joint meeting of the ruling Revolution Command Council and Baath Party leadership discussed the party's role in "mobilizing Iraqis ... to confront the threats and wicked and hostile schemes of America's rulers against our peaceable people," INA said.

Iraq is widely seen as a potential target of a future phase of Washington's "war on terror," launched in Afghanistan in October in retaliation for the previous month's attacks in New York and Washington.

More US military aircraft arrived in the Philippines, bringing supplies for 600 US soldiers taking part as "advisers" in a six-month joint campaign with Filipino troops, military officials said.

The two governments say the troops, the largest overseas deployment of US soldiers since the start of the Afghan campaign, would advise their Filipino counterparts in a campaign to crush the Abu Sayyaf guerrilla group.

But US troops will not be allowed to set up permanent bases in operations against groups linked to al-Qaeda in the southern Philippines, a presidential adviser said Monday.

Meanwhile the Afghan Islamic Press reported Monday that fighting has broken out between rival factions of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.

It said ethnic Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostam's forces and ethnic Tajik fighters loyal to former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani had been fighting in northern Kunduz province for two days.

The clashes broke out around Qala Zaal, 60 kilometers (38 miles) west of Kunduz town on Sunday and some 11 men have since been killed and more than a dozen injured, the Pakistan-based news agency reported.

The two factions were uneasy allies in the battle against the Taliban militia from 1996 until the hardline Islamic regime crumbled following US bombing in November

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No evidence crashed US helicopter shot down in Afghanistan: official
Monday January 21, 3:42 PM AFP

There was nothing to indicate that the US helicopter which crashed in Afghanistan, killing two marines, was shot down, a US official said.

"There is no evidence of enemy fire," US marine spokesman in Kabul, Corporal Matthew Roberson, told AFP, adding, however, that the cause of Sunday's crash was still being investigated.

He said the condition of the five other marines injured in the accident was "stable".

"Their injuries are not life-threatening," he added.

The helicopter, a CH-53-E twin-engined, heavy-duty transport helicopter, crashed in the vicinity of Kabul while on a base resupplying mission early Sunday.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in Washington the cause of the accident appeared to have been mechanical failure.

Roberson said it may be "several months" before the cause of the accident is determined.

The American flag at the US embassy here was flying at half-mast Monday as a sign of respect for those killed in the mishap.

The helicopter was the second US aircraft to crash in the region in less than a fortnight as US-led forces continue the hunt for al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, accused of masterminding the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the leadership of the ousted Taliban regime which sheltered al-Qaeda.

On January 9, a US Marine KC-130 air refueling plane crashed into a mountain in southwestern Pakistan, killing all seven on board. It was the worst air crash during the US campaign in Afghanistan, which started on October 7.

At least four other helicopters and another fixed wing aircraft have crashed during the three-month campaign.