KABUL/WASHINGTON (REUTERS) — The United States and its Afghan tribal allies hounded fighters loyal to Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan where he is believed to be hiding as Washington insisted he be handed over if taken alive.

With confidence rising that time is running out for the man Washington accuses of engineering the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, a tribal spokesman said bin Laden was leading the defense of his mountain hide-outs in Tora Bora in the east.

“He, along with around 1,000 of his people . . . have now dug themselves into the forests of Spin Ghar after we overran all their bases in Tora Bora. He is here for sure,” Northern Alliance spokesman Mohammad Amin told Reuters by satellite phone on Sunday from the eastern city of Jalalabad.

On the aid front, Uzbekistan opened a border bridge for aid deliveries to Afghanistan on Sunday. Foreigners working for U.N. aid agencies were set to resume operations in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif this week.

With the main military campaign now focused on the east, the final nail was hammered into the coffin of Taliban rule when the hard-line Islamists surrendered their last redoubt in Zulam province, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press reported.

“The rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan has totally ended,” AIP said.

The Taliban had controlled 90 percent of Afghanistan and provided sanctuary for Saudi-born bin Laden and his al Qaeda network until the United States launched its war of retaliation after the September attacks that killed nearly 3,900 people.

Vice President Dick Cheney and other U.S. officials said a videotape of bin Laden, made after Sept. 11 and found in Jalalabad, proved beyond doubt his involvement in the hijacking air assaults on New York and Washington.

The U.S. military is confident bin Laden remains holed up in the mountainous east.

“Our latest information is . . . that he is in this area, the so-called Tora Bora area,” Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a television interviewer Sunday.

“They’re in the hills with some other al Qaeda fighters, and they are fighting fiercely against opposition forces, some of our forces and some of our air attacks, trying to survive,” he said.

“The al Qaeda forces that we think are ensconced up there, in some respects trapped up there, are fighting for their lives.”

FIGHT TO GO ON

Myers and Cheney said that even if bin Laden was captured or killed soon, the war against al Qaeda — suspected by Washington of operating in up to 60 countries — would go on.

“Certainly the military operation would be pretty well wrapped up at that point, but we’ve had some other missions that we’ve wanted to accomplish,” Cheney told a television talk show.

He said U.S. personnel were searching Afghanistan for any sign that the Taliban or al Qaeda had been developing germ, chemical or nuclear weapons.

“We also are aggressively searching out a number of sites where they had operations to see whether or not there’s any evidence that they had obtained weapons of mass destruction.”

Cheney said the Arabic-language videotape found in Afghanistan was a kind of smoking gun in which bin Laden showed ”significant knowledge of what happened (on Sept. 11) and there’s no doubt about his responsibility.”

A U.S. official familiar with the tape, speaking on condition anonymity, said it showed bin Laden looking “amused” that some of the hijackers did not realize they were on a suicide mission.

The videotape was shot last month and showed bin Laden describing to dinner companions how he listened to news coverage of the attacks, the official said. “It is very clear that he knew all about it before it happened.”

The whereabouts of Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, his forces now routed, were still unknown. Various reports have had the one-eyed Omar about to be seized, fleeing to Pakistan or wounded in a Kandahar firefight.

Cheney said Washington wanted bin Laden and Mullah Omar turned over to U.S. authorities if they were captured alive.

“We made it very clear that we want Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar and their senior leadership, and if they’re taken alive we expect to take custody of them,” Cheney said.

MILITARY COURTS

Omar and bin Laden would be leading candidates for trial by military tribunals authorized by President Bush, Cheney said.

Cheney ruled out a trial in international court for either bin Laden or Omar, but Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz suggested Omar at least could be tried in Afghanistan.

“We would want to be sure that the kind of justice they would get in Afghanistan would be very similar to what they would get here,” Wolfowitz said.

When asked if that included the death penalty, he said: “The Afghans are not known for kindness to people who have abused them.”

In Moscow, a senior U.S. official traveling with Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters that anti-Taliban warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum had told U.S. officials he would cooperate with Kabul’s new interim government.

Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek and part of the Northern Alliance, dominates most of northern Afghanistan. He had said he would boycott the new administration because it was not balanced.

Kandahar, the southern city regarded as the Taliban’s stronghold, has been the scene of days of feuding by tribal factions who helped sweep the movement from power.

But they apparently reached accord on Sunday, with Afghan Prime Minister-designate Hamid Karzai saying they had agreed to select Gul Agha as interim governor.

In Rome, the grandson of the ex-king of Afghanistan said the monarch would probably return home in March to play his part in the reconstruction of his country, ending almost 30 years of exile in Italy.

“This is not official, but I think March 21 is a good target date. It is the first day of spring. It’s a national holiday in Afghanistan that was banned by the previous regime,” Mostapha Zahir told reporters.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Sunday it would take a decade to rebuild Afghanistan.