Kabul | Tuesday
AFGHANISTAN’S ruling purist Taliban movement has said it will launch a jihad, or holy war, against the United States, according to a broadcast on the Taliban’s Voice of Shariat radio monitored by the BBC.
”I would like to tell my people that our jihad will be formally resuming against the Americans,” the deputy chairman of the Taliban Council of Ministers, Mullah Mohammad Hasan Akhond, said in a speech broadcast late on Monday.
A Taliban representative told the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press that Akhond had not announced a jihad in the radio broadcast but had only said the call would become compulsory if the United States attacked Afghanistan.
”This is not something new. A decision on whether jihad is a must or not and also the issue of Osama bin Laden are under discussion at the Shura (council) meeting of the Ulema in Kabul,” the representative for Akhond added.
However, Afghanistan’s highest-ranking Islamic clerics on Tuesday postponed for at least one day the planned grand council meeting called to discuss what to do with Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden, a Taliban official said.
”The meeting will happen either tomorrow (Wednesday) or the next day,” said a senior Taliban official who declined to be identified.
The Shura of some 1 000 clerics was convened by Mullah Mohammad Omar, but the reclusive spiritual leader of the Taliban movement was not expected to attend.
Bin Laden and the Taliban have denied any involvement in the US attacks.
The Pakistani delegation held three hours of talks on Monday with Mullah Omar in Kandahar, on what Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar called an 11th-hour mission to avert a major crisis. Sattar said it was possible the Taliban were simply unaware of the strength of international feeling against them.
”Try to picture the environment in which the government makes decisions,” he said of the Taliban and their leader, a reclusive, one-eyed cleric who has never been photographed and is believed to have met only two non-Muslims in his life.
Akhond said in the broadcast that it was unimaginable that the ”terror attacks” against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been committed by the Taliban or by bin Laden.
”But the USA and all imperialists in the world, Jews and Christians and their supporters are intending to destroy the Islamic order which has been established at the cost of your blood under this pretext,” Akhond said.
He warned the United States not to attack Afghanistan, a graveyard down the centuries for foreign armies, including the British in the 19th century and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
”It will be the path for the destruction of the American White House, the path for the destruction of Nato, the path for the annihilation of all cadres… of America and its allies,” the radio broadcast quoted him as saying.
The United States says bin Laden — a ”guest” of the Taliban for several years — is a prime suspect and has vowed to punish those responsible and anyone who protects them.
Asked if he wanted to see bin Laden dead, Bush echoed the legendary criminal posters of America’s Old West.
”I want justice,” said Bush, surrounded by Pentagon top brass. ”And there’s an old poster out West that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.”’ – – Reuters
FEATURES:
Shattered World: A Daily Mail & Guardian special on the attack on the US
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The Guardian’s special report on the attacks