-Caveat Lector- http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml;jsessionid=LXPFXJ2SVPQK0CRBAELCFEYKE
EARKIWD?type=topnews&StoryID=500123 WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! Taliban Ministers Surrender but Manhunt Goes On January 08, 2002 11:30 AM ET Email this article Printer friendly version Reuters Photo By Jeremy Page KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Three former ministers of the ousted Taliban government surrendered but the U.S.-led hunt for Osama bin Laden and Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar entered its fourth month with the trail growing cold. The new Afghan government said however both men were believed still in the country. "It is most likely they are in Afghanistan," said Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. In a reminder that bin Laden and other leaders of the al Qaeda network might never be taken alive, a Sudanese fighter blew himself up while trying to escape from a hospital in the southern city of Kandahar. The U.N. food agency started aid operations Tuesday in the western city of Herat for the first time since September, providing enough food to feed 340,000 people for a month in the city and 324,000 in the nearby Maslakh refugee camp. But the World Food Program warned that hundreds of thousands more were desperately hungry around Kandahar and other areas because it was too dangerous for aid agencies to go there. The first 70 German troops to join the British-led international security force left Tuesday for Kabul, first flying west to pick up Dutch soldiers. So far a force of fewer than 5,000 foreign soldiers is envisaged. But interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai said on Tuesday he might ask foreign governments to provide more. "The delegations that I receive ... keep asking for a larger number of international security forces and to be deployed in other provinces, other cities of Afghanistan," he told the BBC. "As need arises, we might ask for that." A spokesman for Kandahar governor Gul Agha said the ousted ministers of defense, justice and mines and industry had given themselves up to authorities in Kandahar, the Taliban's former southern stronghold. "Ministers of the Taliban and senior Taliban are coming one by one and surrendering and joining with us," he said. "Among those who surrendered were former minister of defense Mullah Ubai Dullah, minister of justice Mullah Turabi and minister of mines and industry, Mullah Saadudin," he said. Separately, an Afghan tribal commander said the head of the militia's information department and one of their senior spokesmen, Abdul Hayee Motmain, had been detained and handed over to U.S. forces. But the whereabouts of Saudi-born bin Laden and his ally Mullah Omar remained a mystery. A military spokesman said U.S. forces were going to stop "chasing the shadows" of bin Laden and Omar, and focus on eradicating remaining pockets of al Qaeda resistance. U.S. aircraft dropped pamphlets over eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday warning people not to shelter members of the Taliban and the al Qaeda network or risk being bombed, the Pakistan-based news agency Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) said. NO SIGN OF OMAR U.S. officials had raised hopes that Omar might be captured over the weekend as anti-Taliban forces negotiated with tribal chiefs in Baghran, northwest of Kandahar, for the surrender of fighters thought to be protecting him. The body of the Sudanese al Qaeda fighter was found in a garden outside a ward in a Kandahar hospital where he and several other wounded fighters, mostly Arabs, had been holed up with weapons since early December. It was unclear how many of the fighters were left barricaded in the ward. "Nobody can get near them," a local official said. "Everybody is afraid they will explode something." A poll found that 60 percent of Americans believed the war would not be won until bin Laden was found. A U.S. military official said sweeps of Tora Bora caves in eastern Afghanistan had found evidence bin Laden had been there, but it was unclear how recently. Britain's Tony Blair flew into Bagram air base north of Kabul Monday and said the world would not forget Afghanistan. "The international community is here to help in the long term, but Afghanistan's future is the hands of the Afghan people," he said. A delegation of U.S. senators said Tuesday Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, like the Afghan government, believed bin Laden was still hiding in the Afghan mountains. Pakistan, which until September 11 supported the Taliban, said it hoped to reopen its Kabul embassy next week. Afghan tribal leaders have protested at the continuing killings of Afghan civilians in American air raids but U.S. officials say the bombing will continue until the Taliban and al Qaeda are destroyed. Karzai said Tuesday Afghanistan would not ask the United States to stop bombing until the manhunt had been completed. The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) demanded a probe into the "massacre of prisoners of war who had surrendered to Northern Alliance forces, following assurances that they will be well treated and handed over to the U.N.." The Northern Alliance has said that 600 prisoners, including Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens, and more than 40 of its fighters were killed in three days of fighting which erupted after the inmates staged a revolt in a fortress in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif in November. Human rights organizations and the U.N. human rights chief Mary Robinson have called for an international inquiry. *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. 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