<

U.S. to Fight Through Ramadan; Bin Laden's Call to Arms
Thursday, November 01, 2001
(2:31 PM ET)
By Peter Millership & Sayed Salahuddin
Reuters

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the military would be reinforcing its special forces in Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON/KABUL -- Reuters
The United States cannot afford to halt its military campaign in Afghanistan for the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan and is planning to put more troops on the ground, officials said on Thursday as Osama bin Laden sought to portray the conflict as a war against Islam.

In America, the anthrax scare spread its tentacles further with four Food and Drug Administration mailrooms added to a list of government buildings potentially contaminated. The death of a fourth anthrax victim has baffled scientists trying to track down the origin of the germ warfare agent.

Bin Laden, the Saudi-born militant blamed by Washington for the hijacked airliner attacks on the United States which killed up to 4,800 people, said in a letter broadcast by Qatar's al Jazeera television that the U.S. operation to punish Afghanistan for harboring him was a Christian crusade.

At pains to deflect bin Laden's efforts to present the conflict as Christianity versus Islam, President Bush and his allies have stressed that the campaign in the central Asian nation is purely to hunt down bin Laden and members of his al Qaeda network and in no way represented a war on Islam.
(More: iWon.com News Source)
2001 © Reuters.

Dan