Ireland offers US use of airports for military action

Ireland is to offer the United States full use of its airports for any possible military action it might take in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

The Taoiseach Mr Ahern made the announcement following an emergency EU summit in Brussels.

Mr Ahern said the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, would make a formal offer to US Secretary of State Mr Colin Powell when he meets him next week.

Meanwhile Afghanistan's Taliban rulers have set themselves on course for war with the United States when they defied President Bush's demands to turn over Osama bin Laden.

They continued to insist there is no evidence he was behind the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon than have killed more than 6,000.

In Afghanistan people are deserting their capital in trucks, carts and on foot - fearing a US attack.

Muslim preachers warned their flocks to prepare for war. Pakistani border guards said Taliban troops were reinforcing their positions along the rugged mountain border.

US special forces are reported to already be in countries surrounding Afghanistan.

Tensions rose in the capital Kabul - devastated by 23 years of civil war - after US President Mr Bush warned the Taliban in an address to Congress and the nation that they must hand over bin Laden and his chief lieutenants or "they will share in their fate."

Mr Bush also demanded the Taliban give the United States full access to terrorist training camps and release imprisoned US aid workers, saying the demands were not negotiable. He told his military forces to "be ready" for war.

The Taliban, however, matched the president's defiance. The Afghan embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, said although Afghanistan's clerical leaders have urged bin Laden to leave voluntarily, they would not force the alleged terrorist mastermind out of the country.

"There has been no change in our stand toward Osama," the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, said. "It would be an insult to Islam and its laws if bin Laden is handed over to the United States or forcibly expelled from Afghanistan."

Zaeef insisted the US has provided no credible evidence that bin Laden was behind the attacks.

With signs of an impending conflict, Muslim religious leaders took advantage of traditional Friday religious services to prepare the Afghan people for war.

Speakers in numerous mosques reminded the faithful how Afghan fighters had driven the Soviet army from their country in the 1980s and vowed to do the same to the Americans.

"The Americans are using the name of bin Laden as an excuse to attack our country," a Muslim leader, Mohammed Nawab Haideri, told about 8,000 Shiite Muslims at a mosque in Dashat-eBarchi, a western neighbourhood of Kabul.