WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 (UPI) -- A U.S. general arrived in Kabul Monday to help Afghanistan train a national army while British soldiers are recruiting for an elite Afghan unit to guard the capital.
The international community, eager to restore peace and stability in this war-torn country, has been alarmed by the surge in violence in the post-Taliban Afghanistan.
Aviation Minister Abdul Rahman was allegedly murdered last week by senior Afghan officials from a faction Rahman had defected. Violence also has spread to provinces where rival warlords continue to fight each other.
In another development, British military and Afghan police are investigating claims that peacekeepers from Britain shot and killed an unarmed Afghan man in Kabul on Sunday.
In neighboring Pakistan, police seized four rockets near the country's main Karachi airport also used by Afghanistan's International Security Assistance Force.
And Afghanistan's another neighbor, Iran, said Monday there were no al Qaida members among more than 1,000 Afghan and Arab fugitives detained in the country. Pakistani officials also denied many upper-level al Qaida members were living openly in the country's western frontier territories abutting Afghanistan.
Maj. Gen. Charles Campbell, chief of staff of the U.S. Central Command, arrived in Kabul Monday to help raise a national army in a country where most fighters are loyal to local warlords.
The central government in Kabul has not had a national army since 1993, when the former communist regime collapsed and was replaced by a Mujahedin government. Even under the communists, provinces had their own commanders who worked independently.
Some of those commanders, such as Gen. Rashid Dostum in the north, are still around and are considered a threat to the government in Kabul.
Campbell began his work in Kabul with a meeting with the head of the Afghan army's Gen. Asif Delawar and with the military's top intelligence, training and logistics officers.
Afghan officials estimate tribal chiefs and local warlords command more than half a million fighters. Afghan Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim wants to raise a standing army of 200,000 soldiers and has urged the international community to help train 70,000 soldiers by the end of this year.
But a force selected by Fahim, a commander of the Northern Alliance, may be unacceptable to other Afghan leaders who want an even representation of all groups in the national army.
During a weeklong stay in Afghanistan, Campbell is expected to meet various Afghan leaders and prepare a report for the U.S. Defense Department outlining plans for raising the Afghan army.
Washington plans to send military experts to Kabul early next month to teach training methods to a select group of 600 Afghans. They will then be entrusted with the task of training future Afghan units.
On Sunday, British officers of the U.N.-backed peacekeeping force in Kabul began registering Afghan soldiers to create an elite guard unit. They will be trained by British paratroopers and will be based in the Afghan capital.
Also in Kabul, British and Afghan officials began their probe into the killing of an Afghan man on Sunday.
Amaun Ishaq, 20, was killed in a shootout outside a British security post in Kabul. His family said Ishaq was unarmed and taking his sister-in-law, Faria Ishaq, to a hospital to give birth when the party came under fire.
British soldiers said they retaliated only after "receiving hostile fire from someone near Ishaq's home." Capt. Graham Dunlop, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, soldiers returned fire after locating its source.
But Mohammed Ishaq -- the brother of the man killed in the crossfire -- said Faria Ishaq was was already in the car with the rest of the family and ready to set off for the hospital when they were fired on by British soldiers.
In the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, police found four rockets in a warehouse near the country's main international airport, which is also used by the U.N. peacekeepers in Afghanistan. Police said the rockets were found within firing range of the airport.
In Iran, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said there were no al Qaida members among more than 100 Afghan and Arab refugees held in Iranian jails. The refugees were arrested fleeing Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban regime in November.
Last week, Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency reported authorities had arrested about 150 refugees, including several Arabs, who had entered the country from Afghanistan.
The agency said several of them were being interrogated about possible links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaida network.
Kharazzi confirmed Iranian authorities were holding more than 100 people. "Investigators found no al Qaida or Taliban members among them," he said.
IRNA quoted him as saying that Iran had "no common grounds with al Qaida" and had "no reasons for protecting them."
Relations between Iran and the United States have deteriorated rapidly since U.S. President George Bush's Jan. 29 speech in which he grouped Iran with "an axis of evil" that includes Iraq and North Korea.
The remarks sparked angry reaction in Iran, where hundreds of thousands of people marched in the streets last week chanting slogans against Bush and the United States.
Before this controversy, relations between the two adversaries had shown signs of improvement after Iran supported the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.
