US defense chief Donald Rumsfeld paid a surprise visit to a base near Kabul yesterday, but Afghan fighters said Osama bin Laden, main quarry of the Pentagon's campaign in Afghanistan, had evaded capture.
A senior anti-Taliban commander said the remnants of bin Laden's al-Qaeda forces had been virtually wiped out in the eastern Tora Bora mountains after days of fierce fighting, but the Saudi-born militant himself was no longer there.
"This is the last day for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan," Haji Zaman, top military commander in the eastern Jalalabad region, told reporters.
He said bin Laden had fled, but this would not stop Afghan mujahidin warriors from completing a mopping-up operation.
"Osama bin Laden is not here," he said, referring to the millionaire guerrilla chief blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon near Washington that killed about 3,000 people.
If confirmed, the report would be a disappointment for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the first senior American official to visit Afghanistan since Afghan and US forces toppled Taliban rule in a campaign he largely directed.
Rumsfeld flew into Bagram Airbase north of Kabul and held talks with Hamid Karzai, head of an interim government due to take power on Saturday.
"From the very beginning, we have tried to make it clear that our operation here was not against Afghanistan, against the people, against a religion. It was against terrorism," Rumsfeld told Karzai as they met in a wrecked Soviet-era aircraft hangar.
"The United States coveted no territory. We were here for the sole purpose of expelling terrorists from the country and establishing a government that would not harbor terrorism."
Rumsfeld said earlier that US forces had found materials and documents at a former al-Qaeda base in southern Afghanistan, and were testing them for chemical, biological and radiation content.
In an unrelated incident in the same area, three US Marines were injured in an accidental explosion at Kandahar airport.
Two hundred al-qaeda fighters killed
At Tora Bora, one senior commander said his men had killed 200 of bin Laden's al-Qaeda fighters and taken 25 prisoner.
"Tomorrow we will show you the prisoners and their weapons. We think [the fighting] will all be soon over," Hazrat Ali said on the road back from the front line.
The anti-Taliban fighters had spent the day making their way up two valleys in the jagged White Mountains some 40km south of Jalalabad to try to hunt down remaining al-Qaeda fighters and find their leader in caves burrowed into the hills.
CNN television quoted two anti-Taliban commanders, including Ali, as saying the bulk of the al-Qaeda had left the area and may have escaped over the border to Pakistan.
But Pakistan's border is heavily patrolled by the military, who just a day earlier captured 31 al-Qaeda fighters -- mostly Yemenis -- as they fled Tora Bora for the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan.
Bin laden on the airwaves?
Bin Laden had been heard giving orders on a short-range radio in the last few days, a US official said in Washington on Saturday. But his actual whereabouts remained a mystery.
"I'm going to wait and see where he is. I've received nothing that is discouraging. We continue to receive mixed messages," Rumsfeld said before reaching Bagram.
Rumsfeld has been on a tour of Caucasus and central Asian states, but his visit to Afghanistan was kept a secret until the last moment.
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