NEW YORK, Dec 8: At a secret meeting in Afghanistan held last month during Ramazan, three senior representatives of Osama bin Laden gave the Taliban bad news: Al Qaeda fighters would be shifting to Iraq, Newsweek said on Sunday, quoting sources close to Osama bin Laden.

According to Taliban sources, Osama’s men told emissaries from Mullah Mohammed Omar 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 $3 million monthly contribution to Afghan jihadi outfits.

Newsweek says in its December 15 issue that this was all on the orders of Osama himself because he and his top lieutenants see a great opportunity for killing Americans and their allies in Iraq and neighbouring countries such as Turkey. The Taliban sources complain that their own movement will suffer, the magazine says.

The Arabs informed Mullah Omar’s two representatives — one a former cabinet minister and the other a senior Taliban military commander — that Osama believed Al Qaeda had to widen the scope of its anti-infidel efforts as new opportunities arose.

Over the past year, the magazine said that the CIA and British intelligence have been at odds over how badly the Taliban and Al Qaeda were damaged in the region. “The British were more prone to say the Taliban and Al Qaeda were coming back,” says a US official who is privy to intelligence discussions, and who believes the Bush administration downplayed the threat in order to switch its focus to Iraq.

Mullah Omar’s official spokesman, Hamid Agha, denied in a satellite-telephone interview with the magazine that the Taliban had financial or military problems. “We have enough money to fund our resistance,” he said. The resurgent Taliban say they have been buoyed by an influx of hundreds of former Taliban fighters into their ranks over the past year.