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U.S. closer to pinpointing bin Laden's likely hideout
©Associated Press WASHINGTON -- Evidence is mounting that Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida chiefs are hiding in the White Mountains south of Jalalabad along the Afghan-Pakistani border. U.S. intelligence regards the mountains as their most likely hideout, the AP reported, quoting a U.S. official whom it did not name. Local security forces hostile to bin Laden and the Taliban are preparing an expedition to find him. A U.S. expert on Afghanistan's geology said Tuesday that he had advised the U.S. government that the rocks appearing in bin Laden's videotaped statements put him within the mountain range, known as the Spin Ghar to the region's largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns. "The rock was right," said John F. Shroder Jr., a geology professor at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. "I had been there. The landforms, the cut of rocks, were the right ones." Bin Laden's surviving senior lieutenants -- spiritual adviser Ayman Zawahiri, financial chief Shaihk Saiid and travel planner Abu Zubaydah -- are also thought to be in the region. Bin Laden's military chief, Mohammed Atef, was killed in an airstrike near Kabul last month. The intelligence on their location isn't certain, the U.S. official said. Bin Laden also has bunker complexes in Kandahar and Oruzgan provinces. Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. forces in the Afghan conflict, has said the search for bin Laden has focused on the mountains south of Jalalabad and around the Taliban's southern base at Kandahar. If bin Laden and his aides are in the mountain range south of Jalalabad, they may be at Tora Bora or one of the other bunker complexes that were home to mujahedeen fighters during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. Capturing or killing bin Laden in the mountains is a dicey prospect, analysts said. To root out the terrorist leaders, U.S. or friendly forces should first lay siege to the mountain complexes, preventing supplies from local villages from reaching al-Qaida members, said Ali Jalali, a former Afghan colonel and resistance fighter now living in the United States. Hazrat Ali, the newly installed security chief in Nangarhar province in Afghanistan, said he is assembling a force of about 3,000 men ready to enter the mountains to hunt bin Laden and drive out non-Afghans.
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From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
