Al Qaeda quietly slipping into Iran, Pakistan

Mr. Ali says that about 200 US ground troops were airlifted into the Khost area two weeks ago, but were later pulled back. The troops managed to capture several important Al Qaeda members, suggesting that such ground deployments can sometimes be very effective in the rugged, snow-bound mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

But Afghanistan intelligence chief Abdullah Tawheedi says the hunt would be far more effective if US forces were working more closely with the Northern-Alliance dominated Afghan military. "If they work together with [our forces], we can finish this in one month," he says.

Ali, the Afghan intelligence chief for border and tribal areas, says, however, that the fight in Khost against Al Qaeda has not gone well not only because of the shortage of ground forces, but also because local Afghans have not yet been convinced that it's in their interest to assist in the hunt.

"It is a tribal system and, for now, the leaders don't agree with the way the fight is being conducted there," he says. Scores of Afghan villagers have been reported killed in the US aerial assaults in Khost and Paktia, which followed directly from the heavy bombing raids on Tora Bora in November and December.

While bin Laden was reported to have escaped into Pakistan, he and other operatives could well find Iran an equally attractive destination. Escapees can scale the mountains south along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, then cut through Afghanistan's southernmost provinces and head west toward the border with Iran. Before returning to his mountain redoubt at Tora Bora and then escaping again, bin Laden is believed to have traveled south in November with his right-hand man, Ayman Al Zawahiri, who never returned and has since disappeared from the US military's radar screen.

The route to Iran is a well-worn human smuggling track that has been traveled by some 2 million Afghan refugees in the past 20 years.

After President Bush himself warned against harboring members of Al Qaeda, Iran's foreign ministry flatly denied it had any role in ferrying the fugitives to safety. Afghan officials in Kabul said they did not believe Iran was helping Al Qaeda in any way. But an Iranian official in the region said that for the right price, almost anyone - including senior Al Qaeda or Taliban members - could enter his country with the help of human traffickers.

The official, sitting alongside a photograph of the late Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, denied that the Iranian government had any hand in the smuggling rackets. He stressed that Tehran was committed to upholding international peacemaking efforts in Afghanistan.

"All the people in these smuggling rackets are working only for money, and many of them are armed with weapons far more sophisticated than those being held by our own border guards," he says. American officials say that aid to the escapees could also be coming from hard-line political forces in Iran that stand opposed to Iranian President Mohamad Khatami, who often speaks fondly of Western cooperation.

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