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RUSSIAN TROOPS SAID TO BE IN AFGHANISTAN

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RUSSIA -- Russian military forces are on the ground in Afghanistan, according to a highly respected Russian military analyst.

Pavel Felgenhauer, writing in the weekly Moscow Times, published Thursday, citing what he called reliable sources in Moscow, said that units of the Russian 201st Mechanized Infantry Division, based in Tajikistan for the past five years, have been sent into Afghanistan to help the Afghan United Front, also known as the Northern Alliance, forces resisting the Taliban.

Russian officers and crews are operating with the anti-Taliban forces within 20 miles (30 kilometers) of the capital, Kabul.

Last week, Felgenhauer says, Alexei Arbatov, deputy chairman of the State Duma defense committee, reported that Russian crews and technicians had accompanied tanks and other heavy equipment supplied by Russia to the United Front.

The front, in reports from Afghanistan, is said to be waiting on a signal from the United States when the moment is ready to launch an offensive on Kabul.

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Felgenhauer's disclosures come in an article in which he reports worries about U.S. operations in Afghanistan. Arbatov, he reports, told reporters last week that there are growing misgivings in Moscow's political and military circles over American actions.

Felgenhauer says that the United States is conducting a low-intensity air offensive and that after destroying the Taliban's air defense systems and most of its small air force, U.S. planes still do not venture to fly low-altitude missions. The air strikes have not engaged the bulk of the Taliban's forces, he says, with the result that the United Front does not benefit much from the air campaign.

But, he writes, "even if the allied attack planes do begin to fly close support missions, the effect will be limited, since there are only a few dozen attack planes on the two (U.S.) aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea to cover the whole of Afghanistan. In order to make a dent in the Taliban militarily the West still needs operational airfields near to or inside of Afghanistan for its tactical air force."

As things stand now, he concludes: "The Taliban may counterattack the rag-bag Northern Alliance and defeat it, together with Russian support. The covert Russian invasion of Afghanistan would be exposed, the Russian public would be furious, the elite would blame the treacherous Americans, and the new closeness between Moscow and the West might end in acute acrimony."

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BIN LADEN REPORTED TO HAVE GIVEN TALIBAN $100MN

UNITED STATES -- Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden has given Afghanistan's ruling Taliban an estimated $100 million in cash and military assistance in the last five years, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

As a result of the new information, the CIA has concluded that bin Laden owns and operates the Taliban, the report said.

Bin Laden's military units also provide the Taliban with some of its most committed and effective assault forces, according to intelligence information presented recently to President Bush.

Tens of millions of dollars provided by bin Laden to the Taliban has been directly traced to bin Laden entities through banking and other transfers, sources said.

The money he is funneling is not from his personal fortune, the report said, but from three primary sources: legal and illegal businesses or front companies bin Laden operates directly or indirectly; tribute payments he receives from several Gulf states, companies or individuals that give him funds so he and his al Qaida supporters will stay out of or minimize activities in their countries; and entities that are masked as charities.

Bin Laden, 44, a member of an extended Saudi family, received a personal inheritance of $30 million when his father died in 1968, according to U.S. officials.

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PAKISTAN -- At least 140 people have been killed by the U.S.-led airstrikes against Afghanistan, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press reported Thursday.

Sources told AIP that Wednesday's strikes destroyed the Karam village where dead bodies were being recovered from destroyed homes.

A Taliban spokesman in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad said the Islamist regime had sent a relief team to the area. He said more than 50 dead bodies were recovered from the village and that the number was likely to rise. All 25 houses in the village were destroyed, he said.

AIP sources said some 140 people were killed in Wednesday night's strikes in Nangarhar, Kabul and Kandahar provinces. Ten people were killed in Kabul, 100 in Nangarhar and 30 people in the Gachkhana, Lowalah and Kotal areas of Kandahar Province, the agency said. It said most were women and children.

The casualties, especially if independently confirmed, will fuel protests against the U.S. campaign to find Osama bin Laden and end the Taliban regime, analysts said.

The Bush administration has repeatedly asserted that its targets are military and that it seeks to avoid civilian losses along with stressing the campaign is directed against terrorists and not against Islam.

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Broadcast on Thursday by National Public Radio from Quetta in the Pashtun area of Pakistan included an interview with a local man who said he used not to hate America but does now because of the airstrikes.


IN OTHER NEWS

CHINESE ANNOUNCE DRIVE VS. UIGHUR SEPARATISTS

CHINA -- China announced Thursday a campaign against Muslim Turkic separatists in its far western region bordering Afghanistan. The Beijing government declared it would push to have the Uighur separatists there grouped with organizations being targeted in the ongoing war against terrorism.

"We believe that our fight against the East Turkistan terrorists is also part and parcel of the international effort to combat terrorists," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi said. East Turkistan is the historical name of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and is used by Uighur nationalists trying to shake off the rule of Han Chinese. In 1993, an East Turkistan Islamic Party of God was established struggle for an independent Uighur state.

"We have strong evidence that the East Turkistan elements have not only participated in terrorist activities but they also have links with international terrorist groups," Sun said.

He declined to say what groups they were linked with or what countries they may be operating in. But foreign analysts pointed out that the anti-Taliban United Front in Afghanistan had taken prisoner Uighurs who fought alongside the Taliban.

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The Uighur separatists have set off bombs and provoked riots in their homeland that has been, with brief intervals of freedom, under Chinese rule for centuries.

Analysts have speculated that China would use the U.S led war on terrorism to launch a new crackdown on Uighur dissidents. Arrests in the region have increased significantly since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

They pointed out that Russia has similarly used the cover of the war on terrorism to put pressure of the pro-Western Caucasian republic of Georgia. Russian planes have been implicated in air attacks on Georgia while that country's Abkhaz separatists, supported by Moscow, have alleged they have been attacked by Chechen separatists said to be harbored in Georgia.

China recently closed its small border with Afghanistan and the Chinese government has confirmed reports of troop reinforcement along the Afghan and Pakistani borders, both of which are in Xinjiang.

Beijing has for years been the target of international criticism by human rights groups and the United States for its limiting of religious freedom and heavy-handed tactics in Xinjiang.

"In activities to combat terrorists I believe the international community should strengthen cooperation," Sun said, adding that "there should be no double standard in this regard. Harsh measures should be taken to crack down on them since they are a global scourge."

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U.N. HUMANITARIAN AID NOT FOR ALL AFGHAN REFUGEES

PAKISTAN -- In a large-scale humanitarian operation, the United Nations is rushing hundreds of tons of food, medicine and relief supplies like tents and water purification equipment to Afghan refugees massing on Pakistan's border.

Cargo planes full of aid from Japan and Europe are flying almost daily into Islamabad, where the U.N. is sending out truck convoys packed with aid to Peshawar, Quetta and other areas in expectation of up to 1.3 million Afghan refugees joining the thousands that are already there.

But none of the relief will reach sick and hungry here in Khachiabady, a squalid Afghan refugee camp of some 420,000 people who live within earshot of Islamabad's airstrips.

Khachiabady, which sprang up roughly more than 20 years ago during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, is somewhere between a refugee camp and the poorest of towns. Mud-wall houses with piece-meal roofs made of thatch, corrugated tin and plastic sheeting have replaced tents. Residents raise their own fruits, vegetables and livestock for sustenance rather than rely on packaged emergency rations. The progress largely ends there.

Khachiabady has no electricity, no running water, no phones, no schools and no hospital to treat ever-present cases of malnutrition, typhoid fever, respiratory infections and malaria.

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"All the help goes to Peshawar, but here -- nothing," said Rahimullah Aalamy, a volunteer doctor originally from Kabul.

Aalamy and a handful of other Afghan physicians treat some 15 people a day out of a mud hut sitting over one of the open sewers that carve fetid alleyways through the settlement. Aalamy and the other doctors say they manage to help the majority of people who come to them with deadly diseases with their tiny store of medical supplies, which they buy with the token fees they charge patients.

On average, up to four people, usually children, die everyday in Khachiabady nonetheless.

A jumble of flat rocks serves as unmarked tombstones in the Khachiabady cemetery, a dusty expanse of dry mounds dotted with trash.

Neither the Pakistani government nor the United Nations offers help to the camp, and Pakistani refugee policy prevents any other aid organization from intervening.

Already hosting some 3 million Afghan refugees, Pakistan only allows international aid in places it sets aside for refugees. So areas like Peshawar and Quetta, border towns where the refugee population has swelled, are eligible for aid because the government has approved the sites.

Khachiabady, about 20 minutes by car from the capital, is not officially registered with the government, despite the settlement's long history and its recent growth.

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"Refugee status is granted for people in refugee areas along the border," said Yusuf Hassan, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. "Anyone outside that territory is not a refugee according to the laws of Pakistan. They're invisible."

Facing drought and fearing war, thousands of Afghan refugees were already on the move toward Pakistan and Iran before U.S. warplanes on Sunday began pounding Taliban military installations and alleged terrorists training camps run by Osama bin Laden.

United Nations and Pakistani officials estimate that about 1,000 Afghan refugees are crossing into Pakistan everyday, even though Islamabad has tried to seal off Taliban territory and ruled out accepting any new refugees.

Khachiabady residents say up to 300 Afghans have been arriving everyday recently. In Khachiabady, the risk of being discovered and deported is low since Pakistani authorities simply ignore the settlement.

Khachiabady conditions are so grim, however, that most refugees who wander to it quickly move on to take their chances on the city streets in places like Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore.


NOBEL LITERATURE PRIZE GOES TO V. S. NAIPUAL

SWEDEN -- Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, a Trinidad-born Indian whose writings have put a human scale on large events, has been selected as the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Royal Swedish Academy announced Thursday.

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In its release the academy said Naipaul, 69, was selected for writing often about "the history of the vanquished." His books have involved events in his native Trinidad, India, Africa, the Americas, Islamic countries and Britain, where he moved when he was 18.

The academy called Naipaul "(Joseph) Conrad's heir" and said his short stories marked a "blend of (Anton) Chekhov and calypso."

"In allowing peripheral figures their place in the momentousness of great literature, Naipaul reverses normal perspectives and denies readers at the center their protective detachment," the academy said.

In a statement from his London home, Naipaul said he was "utterly delighted" with the award.

"It is a great tribute to England, my home, and to India, home of my ancestors," he said. "I am utterly delighted, this is an unexpected accolade."

Naipaul's first published book was "The Mystic Masseur," described by the academy as a series of "farcical yarns," in 1957. He continues to work, having published "Half a Life" this year.

Born in July 1932, Naipaul turned his keen mind and wit on the struggling societies of the developing world, and seemed fated to become the voice of people searching for their place in post-colonial times.

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In 1971, Naipaul was one of the first winners of Britain's prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize, for his novel "In A Free State."

The son of an East Indian Brahmin, he grew up in Trinidad, where his father settled after leaving India. Naipaul spent his life restlessly traveling, looking for threads that link together people and societies denied their past by history.

"The reason I write the way I do is that I grew up in a place where there is no refined English speech," Naipaul said during an interview in New York in 1981. "All the subtleties of class refinement you would get in a country like England were absent. There are class clichés in such countries and I grew up without them. That is why in my writing I take care with nuance and idiom."

Naipaul's sharp wit and uncompromising search for truth in his life, his work and in history, often has brought him into conflict with more established societies. He called England, his adopted land, a country of "bum politicians, scruffy writers and crooked aristocrats."

The Oxford-educated novelist called his alma mater "a very second-rate provincial university."

Some of his most moving work grew out of his personal search for his Indian heritage.

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"When I went back to India (in the 1960s), Indian poverty was considered a holy, beautiful thing. It wasn't talked about but now it's defined as a problem, a shame. It does give me some hope for the future. The danger in India was that poverty might be deified but I think that god has been overthrown," he said.

He also criticized certain African writers for writing tracts about the "wicked white man." He said it was easier for them to do that than to come to grips with the real troubles in their own countries.

Queen Elizbabeth II knighted him in 1990.

The Nobel Prize in Literature includes a cash award of about $940,000. The prizes will be formally presented Dec. 10, the birthday of Alfred Nobel, the creator of the award.

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