Anti-Taliban forces said yesterday talks were under way in southern Afghanistan to try to capture cleric Mullah Mohammad Omar without bloodshed.
"We are still in contact with the people there to find a way to end this issue peacefully," said an official working for intelligence chief Haji Gullalai in Kandahar, the sou-thern city that was once a bastion of Omar's Taliban movement.
"I think we can achieve this goal through dialogue and discussion," he said.
PHOTO: AFP
Gullalai is hunting the reclusive, one-eyed supreme ruler of the vanquished Taliban. Mullah Omar is second only to Osama bin Laden on the US' most wanted list. From 1996, Omar provided a home to the Saudi-born millionaire accused of masterminding the Sept.11 attacks.
Omar is believed to have taken refuge with 1,500 fighters near the town of Baghran in southern Helmand, a district 160km northwest of Kandahar.
About 200 US Marines have also been scouring a suspected hideout in southern Afghanistan, but the Marines, who rumbled out of Kandahar in a pre-dawn convoy on Tuesday, were not taking a direct part in the hunt for Omar, US Central Command said.
Instead, they were searching a fenced compound of about 14 stru-ctures in an unspecified part of Helmand suspected of having been occupied at times by bin Laden's foreign volunteers and their Taliban allies, said a Central Command spokesman, US Navy commander Dan Keesee.
"The people who are actually knocking on the doors of these structures are anti-Taliban [Afghan] forces," Keesee said, "and they are backed up by the US Marines."
Central Command has directed a massive US air onslaught on Omar's Taliban and bin Laden's al-Qaeda network since Oct. 7, but many Afghans want the bombing -- blamed for hundreds if not thousands of civilian deaths -- to stop.
The New York Times quoted Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai yesterday as saying he was worried about civilian casualties.
"We want to finish terrorists in Afghanistan -- we want to finish them completely. ... But we must also make sure our civilians do not suffer," he told the paper.
Karzai said he was planning to discuss the bombing of the village with elders from the affected part of the country and that he also plans to discuss the issue with US officials this week, the paper said.
Meanwhile, an official of the new Kabul administration told CNN that US bombs had killed the Taliban's head of intelligence.
"Qari Ahmadullah has been killed by US bombs in Zadran district of Khost province," said Abdullah Tawheedi, a deputy head of intelligence in the interim government.
Ahmadullah was notorious for his torture methods and cruelty.
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