US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Sunday said there "isn't any doubt" that Tehran helped al-Qaeda and Taliban members escape from Afghanistan into neighboring Iran.
"There isn't any doubt in my mind but that the porous border between Iran and Afghanistan has been used for al-Qaeda and Taliban to move into Iran and find refuge," Rumsfeld told ABC television.
"We have any number of reports that Iran has been permissive and allowed transit through their country of al-Qaeda," he added.
The US newsweekly Time, in its issue due out Monday, echoed the report, saying that some 250 senior Taliban and al-Qaeda members were believed to have crossed the border into Iran via a smugglers' route just before the Taliban's Herat contingent fled in November.
"The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has an eye on everything that happens along the border," a Western diplomat in Afghanistan told the magazine on condition of anonymity. "Of course they know that Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters are getting across."
Rumsfeld said he had indications that groups in Afghanistan were receiving weapons from Iran: "We have any number of reports more recently that they have been supplying arms in Afghanistan to various elements in the country," he said.
As for the al-Qaeda terror network and Afghanistan's former ruling Taliban militia, "Their leaders are running," US Secretary of State Colin Powell told CBS television's "Face the Nation."
"They're in hiding, and we're seeking them out."
He said US officials do not know where former Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden are, but "we know they are hiding and they are on the run."
Powell charged, meanwhile, that Iran has been observed "doing some unhelpful things with respect to Afghanistan," including having "Revolutionary Guard elements trying to gain undue influence" in western Afghanistan and Kabul.
According to the article, citing Shiite elders and aides to Herat province governor Ismail Khan, "conventional wisdom in Herat ... is that Tehran hard-liners, especially within the Revolutionary Guards, have a different
political agenda from President (Mohammed) Khatami for the war in Afghanistan -- one they've been actively implementing to the benefit of the Taliban and al-Qaeda."
Powell acknowledged on CBS that "it is quite true that there is a debate, a battle taking place within Iran, between those individuals who we could call more moderate in their approach and may want to be seeking ways to reach out to the rest of the world and the fundamentalists who are against those kinds of outreach efforts."
Most Iranians are Shiite Muslims, and they have been at odds with Sunni Muslim groups like the Taliban for their oppression of Shiites.
(China Daily Februray 4, 2002)
