KABUL, Dec 1: Osama bin Laden is probably on the move, preparing for guerilla war in southern Afghanistan and not holed up underground in the east, Northern Alliance “foreign minister” Abdullah Abdullah said on Saturday.

US Vice President Dick Cheney said this week Osama had probably gone to ground in a warren of caves at Tora Bora, in the White Mountains about 55kms from Jalalabad. But Abdullah said he was probably elsewhere.

U.S. planes have repeatedly bombed the Tora Bora area since air strikes began on Afghanistan on October 7 in the campaign to capture or kill Osama.

Abdullah said the caves were a base for the Al Qaeda network and some of his lieutenants but that their leader was probably in the southern Afghan mountains and on the move.

“They are preparing for guerrilla warfare,” the Alliance minister told a news conference in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

“Tora Bora is a base for al Qaeda, there is no doubt about it. But it is a smaller base and it is encircled so they cannot operate freely from it.”

Cheney said this week that the Saudi-born militant was thought to be hiding in caves more than 1,000 feet (300 metres) deep at Tora Bora, an area he said Osama was familiar with.

“I believe some of his lieutenants are in Tora Bora but not Osama himself,” Abdullah said.

The millionaire militant has reputedly built a subterranean fortress at Tora Bora equipped with water, electricity and ventilation. Some reports have said hundreds or possibly thousands of al Qaeda fighters are there.

Osama’s Afghan protectors, the Taliban, have been squeezed into a shrinking area of their southerly heartland by U.S. bombing and sweeping territorial advances by the Northern Alliance and other adversaries.

U.S. bombers and tribal fighters stepped up pressure on the Taliban on Saturday around their last bastion, the southern city of Kandahar.—Reuters