Author: Ian Traynor
Publication: The Guardian, UK
Date: November 30, 2001
Mullah Omar offer as media deaths
mount
Mullah Mohammed Omar has promised
Afghans blood money for the murder of western journalists. With the roads
of Afghanistan becoming ever more perilous for the huge international media
presence in the country to report the war, the Taliban leader announced
a bounty of $50,000 (£30,000) to any Afghan gunmen who shoot a western
journalist.
The chilling incentive to murder
came shortly after incidents at opposite ends of the country, with the
killing of one European journalist in the Northern Alliance-held north
and the kidnapping and reported torture of a North American journalist
in the south, near the Taliban and Omar stronghold of Kandahar.
Mullah Omar's offer was coupled
with his attempt to rally the dwindling ranks of his Taliban hard core
into standing and fighting the Americans who are increasing their firepower
at an air base outside Kandahar.
Government officials in Tajikistan,
the main point of departure for journalists trying to enter Afghanistan,
and European diplomats said they were taking the Taliban leader's offer
seriously and viewed it as an ominous sign.
"It's getting more dangerous and
unpredictable," said a European ambassador. Senior officials at the Tajik
defence ministry echoed that view.
While the allied forces' casualty
count from almost two months of war is one death, eight journalists have
been killed in Afghanistan in three weeks.
Mullah Omar's incitement to murder
came as the corpse of Ulf Strömberg, a Swedish television journalist
robbed and shot dead in the middle of the night in the northern town of
Taloqan on Tuesday, rested in a Dushanbe morgue yesterday awaiting transfer
to Stockholm.
Scores of journalists based in Taloqan
beat a hasty retreat to Dushanbe shocked by the killing and to register
protest with the victorious Northern Alliance commanders who failed to
guarantee security.
General Rashid Dostam, the Uzbek
warlord whose forces have vanquished the Taliban in the north, refused
to offer security assurances for departing media convoys on the increasingly
lawless roads and made veiled threats against the journalists seeking to
leave Taloqan and Kunduz which fell to his forces this week.
If Mullah Omar's reward offer was
mainly directed at loyal Taliban gunmen in a part of the country where
the media presence is thin or non-existent, parts of the north under Northern
Alliance control are increasingly bandit-infested and lawless, hampering
the badly-needed delivery of aid.
One passenger in a United Nations
aid vehicle was wounded on Tuesday when six gunmen opened fire on the car
beyond Jalalabad east of Kabul.
"Security on the roads inside Afghanistan
remains a huge problem," said the UN refugee agency.
Northern Alliance officials in control
of Kabul are resisting pressure for international peacekeepers in Afghanistan,
arguing that the situation is secure.
But more than 100 US army troops
have just been deployed from neighbouring Uzbekistan to Mazar-i-Sharif
in the north for security patrols and the UN spokesman in Kabul, Khaled
Mansour, said Ulf Strömberg's killing demonstrated that the situation
in Afghanistan was "too dangerous for the media and aid workers to do their
jobs."
He singled out Northern Alliance-controlled
Mazar-i- Sharif and Kunduz in the north as well as the last Taliban bastion
of Kandahar as being particularly plagued by banditry.