US Marines tracked down a band of insurgents in eastern Afghanistan and sparked a battle that left about 12 rebels and two American troops dead, the US military said today.

Iran has frozen four bank accounts belonging to renegade Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who is believed to have teamed up with Taliban rebels and al-Qaida militants, the chairman of a United Nations sanctions committee said.

Two Britons working for a security company were killed today in an attack, claimed by the Taliban, while helping the UN prepare for landmark elections in Afghanistan.

The capture of Saddam Hussein could make it easier to catch the world’s other top fugitive – al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden – and dampen support for the growing insurgency in Afghanistan, allied officials in Kabul claimed.

INSURGENTS attacked a police headquarters in southeastern Afghanistan, sparking a battle yesterday that killed at least 15 fighters and seven Afghan police, a police chief said.

The alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, could also turn out to be the man who murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, a Pakistani intelligence official has said.

AFGHAN rebel commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar said he is proud that the US has branded him a terrorist and echoed Osama bin Laden’s call for suicide attacks against Americans, according to a statement released yesterday.

EIGHTEEN people travelling on a bus were killed yesterday when a powerful bomb destroyed a bridge in southern Afghanistan.

ABOUT 200 US special forces and their allies were battling rebels in southeast Afghanistan yesterday in the heaviest fighting since Operation Anaconda nine months ago.

US special forces have destroyed a drug-production lab and seized documents allegedly tying the site to a fugitive warlord on the United States' most wanted list.

A powerful car bomb rocked a busy market area in the centre of Kabul today, killing at least 22 people in the bloodiest attack in the Afghan capital since the fall of the Taliban.

A powerful car bomb rocked a busy market area in the centre of Kabul, the Afghan capital, today, and a police spokesman said 30 people had been killed and wounded.

An Afghan warlord with links to the Iranian and Pakistani authorities has called for a jihad, or holy war, against the British and US soldiers currently stationed in Afghanistan.

The British-led UN peacekeeping force in Afghanistan has asked the country’s interim administration to explain the alleged coup plot which led to the arrest of hundreds of men in Kabul in the past week.

Hundreds of people were arrested in Kabul in connection with an alleged plot to destabilise the interim administration installed by the UN.

Afghan warlords have a long tradition of changing sides in mid-battle, and none has switched teams more often than Rashid Dostum, the gruff and burly leader of an ethnic Uzbek faction.

A former guerrilla commander in Afghanistan has urged Taliban rulers to form a broad-based alliance to fight the United States, saying that he and his troops are ready to join such a force.

A former Afghan warlord has urged the ruling Taliban regime to form an alliance with other ethnic groups to fight the United States.