(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-10-02 14:33

To help track down 12 insurgent commanders, posters and billboards are to go up around eastern Afghanistan with their names and pictures. Rewards ranging from $20,000 to $200,000 are available for information leading to their capture.

"We're trying to get more visibility on these guys like the FBI did with the mob," said Lt. Col. Rob Pollock, an officer at the main US base in Bagram. "They operate the same way the mob did, they stay in hiding."

The list does not include internationally known names who already have a large price on their heads, such as al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden -- who has evaded US capture since 2001 despite a $25 million bounty -- or Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who is worth a $10 million reward.

Instead, it is filled with local insurgent cell leaders responsible for roadside and suicide bomb attacks.

"We want the people in that area to know who this guy is and know he's a bad guy, and when they spot him to turn that guy in," military spokesman Maj. Chris Belcher said Sunday.

The campaign is reminiscent of efforts in Iraq to capture high-value insurgents. The US military in April 2003 passed out decks of cards with 55 insurgent names and pictures, and in July 2006 the Iraqi government publicized its own most-wanted list of 41 that included Saddam Hussein's wife and eldest daughter.

The Afghanistan program, which went active in recent days, comes despite peace overtures from President Hamid Karzai, who said on Saturday he would be willing to meet with Taliban leader Mullah Omar if it would help bring peace.

Militants hanged the 15-year-old boy from a tree Sunday in a village in Helmand, the most violent province in the country and the world's No. 1 poppy-growing region.

"The Taliban warned villagers that they would face the same punishment if they were caught with dollars," said Wali Mohammad, the police chief in the district of Sangin.

Dollars are commonly used in Afghanistan alongside the afghani, the local currency, though American money is much more common in larger cities, where international organizations are found, than in the countryside.

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