WASHINGTON, Nov 15: The Northern Alliance has captured some senior leaders of the Al Qaeda network in Afghanistan in what could be a valuable intelligence coup, a US defense official said Thursday.

“We have reason to believe that the Northern Alliance has come into possession of some senior leaders,” said the official, who asked not to be identified.

The official said Osama bin Laden was not among those captured by the Northern Alliance.

But the official described the captives, who were not identified, as “some fairly senior players” in Al Qaeda.

“They are senior enough to provide some meaningful information,” the official said.

However, US officials had just learned of their capture and had not had access to them as of earlier in the day, the official said.

Although the circumstances surrounding their capture were not immediately known, the official said “they were clearly captured” by the Northern Alliance and had not defected.

With the Taliban in retreat and under attack even in its southern strongholds, US forces in Afghanistan have intensified their efforts to capture and kill leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Some al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders were killed in air strikes Tuesday and Wednesday on buildings near Kabul and in Kandahar that had been targeted because of the presence of senior leadership, Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, said earlier.

“We are tightening the noose,” said Army General Tommy Franks, the commander of the US campaign in the central Asian nation. “It is a matter of time.”

But so far bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader, have eluded a US dragnet that includes special forces on the ground and an array of high-tech surveillance “eyes in the sky,” officials said.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld raised the possibility that bin Laden may have slipped out of the country in a low-flying Taliban helicopter.

“You’ve got porous borders in a number of directions, you’ve got deep ravines, and to the extent that they may or may not have any helicopters left — we think they may — it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that they could tear down one of the valleys and not be detected,” he said

“It’s not a bottle you can cork. It’s a large country with a lot of borders,” he said.

The US defense secretary said he thought Osama would be found “either there or in another country”.

“But it seems to me that we have to be quite realistic about the task, and the task is, as the general said, to go get the senior leadership of both Taliban and Al Qaeda,” Rumsfeld said.

Franks was in Washington to brief the chiefs of staff and the president’s top national security team on where the campaign will go now.

Both he and Rumsfeld refrained from pronouncing the Taliban defeated, however, noting continued fighting in Kandahar and in the northern town of Kunduz.—AFP