KABUL: The building is a deserted shell. The mud-brick walls have crumbled. Its roof has been torn off by the massive blast that scattered debris and timbers across the courtyard. A lone sentry now stands guard, posted by the Northern Alliance. It was to this building in a village just outside Kabul that Osama bin Laden swept in a convoy of jeeps accompanied by a bodyguard of foreign fighters in late October. And it was to this wrecked compound that the American cruise missile came for him, tipped off to his presence, missing Osama by a matter of hours.

The other day a detailed picture was emerging for the first time of the cat and mouse game between Osama and his American pursuers. It is game whose rules are betrayal and paranoia; whose tools are spies and observation drones and cruise missiles.

A man, who calls himself Amin, tells how Osama had arrived at the Beni Hissar camp on the outskirts of the Afghan capital on October 26, the night before the attack and three weeks after the start of the US-led bombing campaign to crush al-Qaeda.

A former Al Qaeda fighter, Amin says: “There was so much secrecy that we were not even told it was him until afterwards. All we were told was that we had to secure the whole village. He arrived at night, it was after eight, he came in a big convoy of jeeps with 120 bodyguards.”

“When he came into our camp he was completely surrounded by a wall of very tall men. They were so close together you could not see him at all — they were arranged so they could fire in three different directions.”

Amin, aged 23, arrived at the camp, set up in the compound formerly used by an aid organization, one month before. He was one of 15 Taliban bureaucrats sent to work at the camp so that the Arab fighters based there — part of a group of 850 of Osama’s Foreign Legion — could all be released to fight.

The camp was run by a Sudanese commander called Abdul Aziz. When Osama arrived, he told Aziz that he would leave at eight o’clock the next morning, remembers Amin.

Amin said Osama had been due to spend two days there, visiting Kabul, but mysteriously left early the next morning. ‘He just got up at five, said his prayers, then left.’ Soon afterwards everyone in the camp was ordered to get out ‘because we were told there was a cruise missile strike coming’.

Two missiles hit minutes later, at 8am, smashing into the house in the centre of the camp compound.

That was then. Now the most burning question in President George Bush’s war on terrorism is: where exactly is Osama bin Laden?

It is a question of some urgency amid growing fears that key members of the Al Qaeda network may have already fled Afghanistan to regroup for a new assault against the West — possibly from Sudan and Somalia, which are being touted as potential new targets of US action. If true, it is the nightmare scenario feared by America and its allies.

Confronted with the offer of a 25 million dollars bounty for information on the whereabouts of Osama, Afghans are falling over themselves to supply information.

However, most of the information flowing in is believed to be old sightings — or of dubious value. Indeed, Pakistani intelligence sources report a decline in the number of recent eyewitness accounts coming across their desks.

Those ‘sightings’ that have emerged are inevitably contradictory. There are reports that Osama has shaved off his beard and taken to the Tora Bora mountains, moving from fortified cave to cave each night on horseback, protected by up to 1,500 fighters. Those pushing this version, including local militia leaders, say Osama was last spotted three nights ago in the mountains.

America’s solution to the apparent absence of intelligence on Osama’s whereabouts has been to ratchet up the manpower hunting on the ground and to deploy a new hi-tech unmanned spy plane in the skies over Afghanistan.

Last week US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confirmed the long-range Global Hawk had joined the hunt, even though testing of the aircraft had not yet been completed.

What is also certain is the US determination to capture or kill Osama — a mission that has become an act of faith for the Bush administration, no matter how difficult.

A Pentagon source says: “We’re at the point of deciding the exact right moment to put in around 2,000 Marines to do what they and no one else can do — search and destroy, which means find the target and kill him.”

Informed Afghan sources in Pakistan have also told The Observer that last weekend Osama spent at least one night around the town of Skinkay, about 30 miles north of Maruf in the neighbouring province of Zabol.

Even if he is located, the task of ‘smoking him out’ will be difficult.

The nightmare scenario facing the US is that Osama or his senior lieutenants escape to regroup and perpetuate the Al Qaeda threat. If Osama were to escape to a country like Yemen or Somalia, it would be a disastrous setback for the US-led effort to catch or kill him.

“That really is a nightmare scenario. We could be back to square one,” said one Western diplomat.

Meanwhile, the US pursuit of Al Qaeda is preparing to extend to new corners of the globe — Africa and South America — as the Pentagon and CIA plan the next phase of the war on terror. Pressure is building up in Washington to hit at Saddam Hussein’s Iraq once the Taliban is subdued — but Somalia and Sudan are the latest countries to come within America’s sights.

Talking to The Observer last week, Pentagon officials said that military intelligence indicates that a wing of Al Qaeda is preparing to re-group. Sources say the organization around which a re-grouping may be attempted is ‘Al Itihaad’, which had come under the Al Qaeda umbrella.

Sources say Al Qaeda’s most mercurial figure may have already slipped the net: Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian militant jailed but later released for his part in the successful plot to assassinate President Anwar Sadat. Sources say Somalia would be the favourite choice. The Pentagon has drawn up military plans for a strike against Somalia should any sign emerge of co-operation between the Mogadishu regime and any group liked to Al Qaeda.

Similar plans have also been drawn up against the Sudan.

Further US action in Somalia is for the future, however. For now, Osama and his allies continue to hide.—Dawn/The Observer News Service.