By PAUL GARWOOD
The Associated Press
Thursday, May 4, 2006; 9:52 PM
KABUL, Afghanistan -- An Afghan warlord wanted by the United States declared his support Thursday for Osama bin Laden, a pledge security experts say will increase the threat against U.S.-led coalition and Afghan forces.
But American and Afghan military officials dismissed Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's action as propaganda, saying his fighters are increasingly isolated by military operations in the country's volatile east.
Speaking in a videotape aired on the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera, Hekmatyar said: "We hope to participate with ... (al-Qaida) in a battle that they lead."
"They hold the banner and we stand alongside them as supporters," said the white-bearded Hekmatyar, speaking Arabic and wearing a black turban.
The tape appeared less than two weeks after top militants, including bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, released messages to rally Muslims to fight U.S. and allied forces. Like al-Zawahri, Hekmatyar criticized Pakistan for aiding the United States in its anti-terror campaign along the Pakistan-Afghan border.
It also comes amid a spike in Taliban-led suicide attacks against coalition and Afghan forces in southern Afghanistan, and a U.S.-Afghan operation in eastern Kunar province, bordering militant hotbeds in Pakistan's tribal regions.
Like bin Laden, Hekmatyar is believed to be hiding in the mountainous territory along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
Hekmatyar has previously released video and written statements urging Afghans to support al-Qaida and wage jihad, or "holy war," against U.S.-led forces.
But his latest tape was the first committing his forces to follow bin Laden. Such support would be valuable to al-Qaida's Arab leaders, who don't speak the myriad Afghan languages, particularly the Pashtu dialect spoken by Taliban militants and allied Afghan extremists.
"We know that there has been some kind of alliance between Hekmatyar and al-Qaida, but saying he will fight under (bin Laden's) command is new and significant," said Mustafa Alani, a military analyst with the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center. "After almost five years since the occupation of Afghanistan, it shows that al-Qaida is still leading the fight here."
However, Lt. Col. Paul Fitzpatrick, a U.S. military spokesman at the U.S. base in Bagram, north of Kabul, described Hekmatyar's remarks as "posturing" and his fighters as "criminal elements trying to protect their smuggling operations."
"Hekmatyar is no more a threat now than he would be tomorrow," said Fitzpatrick, who believes the warlord is hiding in northern Pakistan. "They are an element that is not supportive of the government of Afghanistan, which makes him an enemy of the coalition. But this call for an alliance with al-Qaida won't have any effect."
Hekmatyar, a Sunni Muslim and ethnic Pashtun leader of the militant Hezb-e-Islami group, speaks excellent English. He gained a reputation for extreme violence while leading militant attacks against the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation and repeatedly shifted his support during more than 20 years of conflict in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden and Hekmatyar forged their relationship during the mujahedeen campaign against the Soviets. The Afghan warlord built a powerful militant force through CIA support, funneled through Pakistan.
During the 1992-1996 civil war that ravaged Kabul after the Soviet pullout, killing 50,000 people, then-prime minister Hekmatyar turned his fighters against those of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik. But the pair banded together in a failed attempt to stave off the emergence of the hard-line Taliban regime, which eventually drove Hekmatyar out of Kabul in 1996.
He went into exile in Iran, where he spent several years before returning after the U.S.-led coalition toppled the Taliban in late 2001 following the Sept. 11 attacks.
But his once close ties with Washington dissipated as American troops began hunting Islamic militants, particularly bin Laden and those allied with him. His fall from grace pushed him into a marriage of convenience with fellow militant outcasts, the Taliban.
In May 2002, his former CIA patrons reportedly ordered a Hellfire missile attack fired from an unmanned spy plane while he was in Afghanistan.
Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammed Zahir Azimi said Hekmatyar's fighters were becoming "increasingly isolated" and his tactics had changed from attacking soldiers to "targeting innocent people like teachers, shopkeepers and NGOs and putting bombs on the road."
Singapore-based militant expert Rohan Gunaratna said Hekmatyar was merging with al-Qaida and the Taliban in an attempt to inflame Afghanistan's insurgency and reinvigorate his ties with bin Laden.
"Traditionally Hekmatyar and bin Laden have been friends, so certainly this is a case of two old friends uniting forces," Gunaratna said.
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Associated Press writers Amir Shah in Kabul and Mariam Fam in Cairo, Egypt, contributed to this report.