﻿Afghan Taliban Says Sees Holy War Against U.S.

                            KABUL (Reuters) - 
                            Afghanistan's
                            ruling Taliban movement will launch a holy war against the
                            United States, a senior cleric said on the Taliban's Voice of
                            Shariat radio, warning Washington against attacking his
                            country.

                            Officials of the Islamic movement moved quickly to say that
                            the deputy chairman of the Taliban Council of Ministers,
                            Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhond, was not in a position
                            to declare a holy war, or jihad, and a final decision lay with
                            a council of clerics due to convene this week.

                            ``I would like to tell my people that our jihad will be
                            formally resuming against the Americans,'' Akhond said in
   a speech broadcast on the radio late on Monday and monitored by the BBC.

   Akhond's remarks reiterated a call from Mullah Mohammad Omar, spiritual leader of the
   purist Taliban movement, for holy war if the United States attacked.

   Officials said only a meeting of an estimated 1,000 of Afghanistan's clerics that is expected
   to be held in the capital, Kabul, on Wednesday or Thursday, could declare jihad.

   ``Jihad will not be pronounced by the authorities of the Islamic Emirate (of Afghanistan),
   but by the ulema (clerics) and they have not begun their work yet,'' Taliban Information
   Minister Qudratullah Jamal told Reuters.

   ``They are on their way, converging in Kabul and once they all gather here the meeting will
   start and they will take a decision about the whole situation,'' he said.

   Officials stressed that Akhond had not announced a jihad in the radio broadcast but had only
   said the call would become compulsory if the United States attacked Afghanistan.

   ``This is not something new. A decision on whether jihad is a must or not and also the issue
   of Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) are under discussion at the Shura (council) meeting
   of the clerics in Kabul,'' a spokesman for Akhond told the Afghan Islamic Press.

   Afghanistan's highest-ranking Islamic clerics on Tuesday postponed for at least one day
   their planned grand council meeting called to discuss what to do with Saudi-born militant
   Osama bin Laden, a Taliban official said.

   ``The meeting will happen either tomorrow (Wednesday) or the next day,'' said a senior
   Taliban official who declined to be identified.

   Akhond said in the broadcast that it was unimaginable that the ``terror attacks'' against the
   World Trade Center and the Pentagon (news - web sites) had been committed by the
   Taliban or by bin Laden.

    ``But 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 under this pretext,''
                            Akhond said. He warned the United States not to attack
                            Afghanistan, a graveyard down the centuries for foreign
                            armies, including the British in the 19th century and the
                            Soviet Union in the 1980s.

                            ``It will be the path for the destruction of the American
                            White House, the path for the destruction of NATO (news -
                            web sites), the path for the annihilation of all cadres... of
                            America and its allies,'' the radio broadcast quoted him as
                            saying.

                            Such a holy war would mark ``the path for the liberation of
   Muslim countries which are living under American imperialism,'' he said in the radio
   broadcast.