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New York: Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden will try to capitalise on Saddam Hussein's humiliating arrest to radicalise and '"Islamise" the anti-US resistance in Iraq, a media report said today (Dec 22, 2003) quoting Taliban fighters.

The deposed Iraqi President's capture has not changed bin Laden's plans to shift anti-American "forces" from Afghanistan to Iraq, Turkey and the Mideast, they said.

"The arrest of Saddam will have a positive affect on the anti-US jihad and Qaeda operations in Iraq," Rahman Hotaki, a Taliban official who works with Qaeda fighters in Waziristan on the Pakistan- Afghanistan border, was quoted as saying.

"Many Iraqis hated Saddam, so they didn't join the fight. Now that he is gone, more Iraqis will join a holy jihad against the US," he told 'Newsweek' magazine.

It quoted sources as saying that US man-hunting teams in Afghanistan have come close to finding bin Laden on several occasions.

A senior Taliban planner and fund-raiser who goes by the name Guerre Zabihullah told 'Newsweek' that bin Laden had a close call not long ago during which he and his protective entourage scurried into the bushes when a US aircraft streaked overhead as they were walking along a mountain trail. The plane did not see them.

Another Taliban fighter who calls himself Assadullah Zarafat told the magazine that several months ago, US and Afghan forces in Uruzgan province brushed by Mullah Omar, the ousted Taliban leader who remains their closest political ally, without recognising him.

PTI

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