Closing in on the elusive bin Laden

"[The Arabs] are paying a lot of money for people to work for them, because they have no place to live at night," says Sohrab Qadri, intelligence chief for Nangarhar Province, who estimates that there are 1,000 to 2,000 members of bin Laden's organization, Al Qaeda, in the White Mountains. "We have spies among the villagers there, who come to Jalalabad to buy food for the Arabs, and they tell us what the Arabs are doing."

While bin Laden's trail may be no more than four days old, few of the top commanders here in Jalalabad are in any rush to go after him. Their top priority, they say, is creating a stable government in Afghanistan and keeping the peace in a city where armed men prowl the streets and looting is still a daily event.

"We have nothing, no weapons, to go up into the mountains and fight with, no food to eat, no place to sleep, so how can we go and fight?" asks Haji Zaman Ghamsharik, military chief for Nangarhar province, sitting in his military headquarters, surrounded by about a hundred well-armed men and visiting dignitaries. "We are trying our best to bring peace and tranquility to the province."

Just how much of Nangarhar Province is under military control is difficult to gauge. On Friday, a group of journalists drove 10 minutes south of town to visit the suburb of Farma Hadda, where bin Laden once had a home and where American bombs had been dropped the night before. Nervous militiamen at checkpoints warned that Arabs were still operating in the area, and only let the journalists pass after seeing a permission slip from the brother of Hazrat Ali.

Babrak Shah, owner of a guesthouse in Farma Hadda, says he distinctly remembers seeing bin Laden leaving his nearby home on the night of Nov. 13, when the Taliban abandoned Jalalabad.

"I saw him under a tree, holding the hands of Maulvi Abdul Kabir [the Taliban's governor of Nangarhar]," says Mr. Shah, who says he once worked as a guard at bin Laden's house at Farma Hadda from 1992-96. "He was standing there for more than a half hour, as a convoy of several hundred vehicles headed out of town to Tora Bora."

He says he remembers the time, 9:30 p.m., because he had just missed hearing the end of the Pashtu-language BBC news program.

What is clear is that someone left bin Laden's former house in an organized haste. In a mud-and-brick walled compound that stretches over at least an acre, all of the furniture is gone, but there are still piles of mortar shells and stacks of catalogs of military equipment left in many of the dozens of rooms. In one of a half-dozen kitchens, bulbs of garlic lie on the floor, with green shoots sprouting from the whitish skin.

There are no signs of the vials of sarin gas, which the late Spanish reporter Julio Fuentes wrote of seeing in bin Laden's house more than a week ago. Mr. Fuentes was one of four journalists killed by gunmen on the road to Kabul last Monday.

Philip Smucker contributed to this report.

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