Chiefs to decide on peace mission

British defence chiefs are due to decide on the size and mission of the British contribution to the peace force for Afghanistan later today.

They will wait for the preliminary report from the reconnaissance party led by Major General John McColl, which is due back this afternoon.

Tony Blair announced yesterday in Parliament that about 1,500 British peacekeepers will head for Kabul soon. They will be the leading element of a force totalling about 5,000. Some defence planners have questioned whether they will be required at all.

The new prime minister of the interim government in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is to have talks with the former king Zahia Shah in Rome later today. They are to discuss a future role for the exking, who lost power 25 years ago. Zahia Shah, now 87, has said he will return in March when he is expected to call a traditional assembly of tribal elders, a Loya Jirga, to decide on a new constitution.

In Britain, Royal Marines of 40 Commando have been put on standby to go to Kabul by the weekend, when the new government is due to take office. Some defence advisers to the government are not sure that the Marines can make the deadline - though a company from 40 Commando is already in place at Bagram airfield 25 miles north of the capital.

The recommendations of the reconnaissance team led by General McColl are due to be put before a conference of contributing nations to the peace force in London tomorrow, though this may now have to be postponed. Britain has said it is still willing to lead the force in Kabul but only if it has the backing of a UN Security Council resolution. "We have to decide what the role of the peace force will be, and whether there is a role at all," a defence ministry source said yesterday.

A peace force, and particularly a British participation in it, has been opposed by the faction that has taken control of Kabul. Abdullah Abdullah, the foreign affairs minister, and Fahim Khan, the defence minister in the new interim government, have said they want "no more than 1,000 peacekeepers".

Both come from the Jamiat faction led by former president Bunharrudin Rabbani, and have said they are against the presence of British peacekeepers. Some British commanders fear that the peacekeepers have little realistic role to play and might be stepping into yet another Afghan civil war.

The Jamiat-i-Islami broke agreements with other allies in the Northern Alliance to make a grab for Kabul on 8 November. Most are Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley and northern Afghanistan, and have a poor reputation with many in Kabul. When Rabbani was president between 1992 and 1996, Kabul saw a bout of interethnic fighting which left about 50,000 dead and large parts of the city destroyed.

In southern Afghanistan the hunt for Osama bin Laden and founder of the Taliban Mullah Omar goes on - though there is little trace of either. Mullah Omar has been reported by Pashtun fighters in Kandahar to have fled to Baghran in the north of Helmand province. He is reported to have taken 500 fighters with him in a long convoy from Kandahar, laden with looted supplies.

The allies are hoping that he may be betrayed by former Taliban supporters. Many of his henchmen are reported to have changed sides for money or land. In Nangarhar province, where al Qaeda have made a stand against local tribesmen and American and British special forces, Taliban have defected to the Hisbi-i-Islami party - once one of the most fundamentalist organisations of the Mujahideen.

In Nangarhar, Hisbi-i-Islami has split into two factions which have been fighting each other - one led by the warlord Younis Khanis and the other led by the movement's founder Gulbadin Hekmatyar. As rising Islamicist student leader he earned an unattractive reputation for throwing acid in the faces of women students at Kabul university whom he deemed were not dressing with sufficient modesty. Though some 19 foreign al Qaeda fighters have been taken prisoner, none has given concrete information on Bin Laden's whereabouts.

Anthrax 'produced in US'
CIA to quiz Australian fighter