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New York: Al-Qaeda plans to shift a large number of fighters from Afghanistan to Iraq, a media report said today (Dec 8, 2003).

Three senior representatives for Osama bin Laden had given the Taliban the news at a secret meeting in Afghanistan during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, 'Newsweek' magazine reported.

Quoting Taliban sources, the magazine said bin Laden's men told emissaries from Mullah Mohammed Omar, the elusive leader of Afghanistan's ousted fundamentalist regime, that al-Qaeda would be diverting a large number of fighters from the anti-US insurgency in Afghanistan to Iraq.

Al-Qaeda also planned to reduce by half its three-million-Dollar monthly contribution to Afghan "jihadi" outfits.

The sources claimed that this was all on the orders of bin Laden himself because the terror chieftain and his top lieutenants see a great opportunity for killing Americans and their allies in Iraq and neighbouring countries such as Turkey.

Bin Laden believes that Iraq is becoming the perfect battlefield to fight the "American crusaders" and that the Iraqi insurgency has been "100 per cent successful so far", according to a Taliban participant at the mid-November meeting who goes by the nom de guerre Sharafullah.

PTI