Bush warns time running out, Taliban boost troops
( 2001-10-07 16:28 ) (7 )

Tension mounted in central Asia on Sunday as Bush gave his clearest indication yet that military action would be launched soon against Afghanistan and the ruling Taliban deployed extra troops to their northern border.

As a near month-long diplomatic and military buildup to isolate Afghanistan appeared almost complete, US President Bush declared in a weekly radio broadcast: "Full warning has been given and time is running out."

In Afghanistan, the Taliban said the extra 8,000 troops were being sent to its northern border with Uzbekistan to join several thousand already there.

"We have deployed our forces there at all important places. This is the question of our self respect and we will never bow before the Americans and will fight to the last," Afghan Islamic Press quoted a Taliban spokesman as saying.

The United States has sent some 1,000 soldiers to Uzbekistan as part of its biggest military buildup since the 1991 Gulf War.

In an indication that military action might be close at hand, Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, fighting to oust the Taliban, said on Sunday it had suspended helicopter flights to its Panjsher valley stronghold north of Kabul for at least two days.

"There will be no flights to Panjsher today or tomorrow. Perhaps the next day (they will resume)," Dr Abdullah Abdullah, foreign minister in the Northern Alliance government, told Reuters by telephone.

"Before it was for the weather. Now there is a different reason," Abdullah said without elaborating.

On Saturday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said plans were in place for a military strike against the Taliban, who are accused of harbouring Osama bin Laden, blamed for attacks on the United States last month that killed some 5,600 people.

"Things are coming into place, although obviously the timing on any such action is a matter we must discuss with our close allies," Blair told reporters on return from a whirlwind tour of Russia, Pakistan and India.

US and British aircraft carriers, more than 300 warplanes, ships armed with cruise missiles and special forces troops have gathered within striking distance of Afghanistan. Some 30,000 troops have also been deployed.

On the economic front, the world's richest nations, meeting in Washington, said they would work together to jump-start global growth and choke off funds for groups that sponsor terrorism.

"We are strongly committed to bringing forward needed measures to increase economic growth and preserve the health of our financial markets," the Group of Seven finance ministers said at the end of their meeting.

KABUL EXODUS

In Kabul, scores of people prepared to leave the beleaguered capital, a day after the sound of anti-aircraft guns trying to hit a circling spy aircraft renewed fears of imminent military strikes.

"Well, until recently some who could afford to go stayed with the hope that there may not be a war," one resident said. "But the refusal of the Taliban's conditional offer and Bush's weekly radio message all show that soon there will be a war."

The United Nations says a quarter of Afghanistan's 24 million population are dependent on food aid, that over a million people have fled their homes within the war- and drought-ravaged country and that up to 1.5 million more ay try to cross into neighbouring countries.

Aid agencies stepped up their pleas for emergency food shipments to the country and Oxfam said between one million and two million people were already on the road in Afghanistan, trying to reach safety.

An offer from the Taliban on Saturday to release eight foreign Christian aid workers on condition the United States ended its threats was rejected by both Washington and Canberra.

"We cannot accept the linkage that is apparently being made by the Taliban," Australian Prime Minister John Howard said.

The aid workers, four Germans, two Americans and two Australians were arrested in early August along with 16 Afghan colleagues on charges of promoting Christianity. They deny the accusations.

But the spiritual and supreme leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar, has ordered the release of 43-year-old British journalist Yvonne Ridley, detained more than a week ago after sneaking over the border from Pakistan. She was to be freed on Saturday or Sunday, Taliban sources said.

In Washington, US administration officials said they saw no immediate connection between an explosion in eastern Saudi Arabia on Saturday and the US military buildup.

Two people were killed and four others wounded, all foreigners, when an explosion ripped through an electronics shop in the city of al-Khobar, the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.

A US embassy official said one American was killed and another wounded. Khobar was the scene of a truck bomb attack in 1996 that killed 19 US servicemen.

In an attempt to clamp down on anti-American sentiment, authorities in Pakistan on Sunday detained the leader of a pro-Taliban Islamic party, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, at his home in the North West Frontier Province.

Rehman heads the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islami (JUI) party, which has held several demonstrations to protest against threatened US-led military strikes in Afghanistan.

"HEAVY PRICE"

In his Saturday broadcast, Bush said: "For those nations that stand with the terrorists, there will be a heavy price."

"In the struggle ahead, we will act in accordance with American ideals," he said. "We're offering help and friendship to the Afghan people. It is their Taliban rulers and the terrorists they harbour who have much to fear."

He said the Taliban had turned Afghanistan "into a sanctuary and training ground for international terrorists -- terrorists who have killed innocent citizens of many nations".

Omar, the Taliban's spiritual leader, took a defiant line in a statement faxed to reporters in Kabul. "Those who have perpetrated the attacks in the United States have left no traces behind them. If the United States thinks that the hijackers were the real culprits, then they have been killed," he said.

"No one will commit suicide on the orders of another or for the aims and interests of others," Omar said, adding that the United States should examine its own record in trying to find the "remedy" for the attacks last month.

US support for Israel and the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia have been cited as factors fuelling Islamic hostility toward America.