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Clerics Called to Council of Holy War
Wednesday September 19, 2001
By Rory McCarthy in Islamabad

Afghans' fate rests with 1,000 religious leaders

The Guardian
The fate of Afghanistan rests in the hands of 1,000 poor, uneducated clerics who have been ordered out of their remote villages to decide whether their country should go to war with America.

Religious leaders from distant mountainous provinces across Afghanistan left their mosques and travelled for hours along rutted roads to the capital, Kabul, to answer the call from their supreme leader. Others crossed from the refugee camps in Pakistan, now home to hundreds of thousands of Afghans.

"Veteran honourable ulemas [clerics] should come to Kabul for a sharia decision," Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, announced on state radio. "The valorous nation can defend Islam and their country in the light of the verdict."

At first there was only one question on the agenda: whether Afghanistan, a country gripped by poverty and almost completely destroyed by two decades of fighting, should declare a holy war against the United States, the world's largest superpower and the standard bearer of secular western capitalism.

The answer, it appears, is in little doubt. "I would like to tell my people that our jihad [holy war] will be formally resuming against the Americans," Mullah Mohammed Hasan Akhund, the movement's number two, said yesterday.

"The USA and all imperialists in the world, Jews and Christians and their supporters, are intending to destroy the Islamic order which has been established at the cost of your blood."

At first the clerics were due to meet to make their decision yesterday. But now the council has been delayed until today and a much more vexing question will be discussed that may yet determine whether the regime scrapes through its worst crisis or is bombed into the ground by a massive US retaliatory strike.

Senior Taliban figures appear ready to think the unthinkable and consider giving up Osama bin Laden, the 44-year-old Saudi dissident who to the movement is the hero of Islam and to America the prime suspect in last Tuesday's bombings in New York and Washington.

A delegation of Pakistani officials, led by the head of the ISI intelligence agency, met Mullah Omar and was last night meeting other senior Taliban leaders as the possible compromise was discussed. In return for handing bin Laden over the Taliban reportedly want the Saudi to be tried in a "neutral" country, an end to sanctions, and an arms embargo imposed on Afghanistan's opposition forces.
(More: The Guardian News Source)

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