WASHINGTON, June 28: Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan and Afghanistan have received new shipments of weapons and other equipment, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told The Washington Times in an interview published on Friday.

“We have very recently discovered some new stuff that is not old, and it is modern,” Rumsfeld said in an interview published Friday. “It is expensive. It is well-done.”

Without disclosing where the equipment was found, he said it included “25 backpacks all well done with the right equipment and modern stuff and professionally done.”

Rumsfeld declined to describe the “modern stuff”, but said it was being separated for the emerging Afghan national army. Older equipment he said was “dangerous and unstable” is destroyed, he added.

Rumsfeld said the equipment came from “everywhere. If you spread it all out, the passports are from lots of different places. The medical equipment and the weapons are from lots of different places.”

“So it’s not like the money’s dried up. There’s still more money and more new things coming in,” Rumsfeld said referring to al-Qaeda’s finances.

Rumsfeld said he was amazed at the amount of weapons that have been accumulated in Afghanistan throughout its long history of warfare.

“Literally, you cannot imagine the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things, armoured vehicles and rockets, everything under the sun. Surface-to-air missiles. It must be from 20 different countries,” he said.

Rumsfeld said the US-led military campaign tracking down Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan was making progress, but warned that the war was far from over.

He estimated that remnants of the enemy forces remained in probably one third of Afghanistan’s 32 provinces.—AFP