Terror Hit List Drawn up by US

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The Guardian, 10 December, 2001There were increasing indications last night that the US has honed a hit list of countries to target for military action in rogue regions across the globe where it believes terror cells flourish.

While the vice-president, Dick Cheney, issued a stinging verbal assault on Iraq, the list includes mainly peripheral countries whose governments are not in control of all of their territory.

Mr Cheney, a renowned hawk and veteran of the last US administration which took on Saddam Hussein, accused Iraq of harbouring terrorists and "aggressively pursuing" weapons of mass destruction. But he insisted no decision had yet been taken whether to attack the Baghdad regime.

Instead reports are pointing to other more immediate targets, almost certainly in places less diplomatically fraught.

US intelligence officials appear to have drawn up a detailed target list of terror bases across the globe. They are urgently assessing the risks posed by facilities in the Aceh region of Indonesia (a secessionist part of Sumatra), the Hadramawt region of Yemen, and Ras Komboni in southern Somalia, near the Kenyan border. The sites have been identified from documents and confessions from captured fighters.

According to a report in the Los Angeles Times which details the possible targets, Somalia, where central government hardly exists, is causing increasing concern in Washington. Walter Kansteiner, the secretary of state for African affairs, claimed on Friday that people with ties to Osama bin Laden were involved in the transitional regime trying to take power in Mogadishu.

Somali officials admit there was a base at Ras Komboni, but they and aid agency workers say it has long been abandoned. The newspaper also says US special forces have launched discreet raids against al-Qaida cells in Bosnia-Herzegovina and taken more than a dozen suspects prisoner.

Another area of worry is the Philippines, where the US is willing to help rescue two American missionaries who were kidnapped by Islamic separatists in May, a presidential spokesman said yesterday.

There was good news for the US yesterday from Kandahar, where the interim Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, said he had reached agreement with rival factions for control of the city. The city's pre-Taliban governor, Gul Agha, will be in control, with the former Taliban supporter Mullah Naqibullah as his deputy. The two men's forces have fought since the Taliban ceded control last week.

The Northern Alliance warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostam, was said by the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, to be "willing to cooperate".

Domestic pressure on the White House remains centred on attacking Iraq, and Mr Cheney did little to cool public ardour.

Making a rare foray from his "secure location" into a TV studio, he said evidence of Iraq harbouring terrorists was "pretty conclusive" and that President Saddam had a robust programme of building chemical and biological weapons which he had proved he was willing to use.

"Given the events of September 11, given the vulnerability of the US that has now been demonstrated and given the increasing linkage between the terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, we have to be very deliberate in terms of how to proceed to make certain the US is not vulnerable to that kind of attack," Mr Cheney said.

Today's issue of the US magazine Newsweek quotes intelligence sources saying the FBI believes its sweep of visa violators and other suspects of Middle Eastern backgrounds after September 11 picked up members of a "support cell" meant to help in another attack in the US.