Abdullah, a 21-year-old from Ilford, UK, whose parents moved to Britain from Uganda, told the Sunday Times of London he would travel to Afghanistan this week to fight with Taliban forces against American and British soldiers.

A telecommunications engineer, Abdullah, spoke to the Sunday Times reporter in Lahore, Pakistan with his face covered by a headscarf.

He is a recent convert to Islam, though his mother's father was Pakistani.

In 1999, a British-born bin Ladenite Pakistani inspired enthusiasm in Abdullah for fighting with the Taliban.

Now, as Britain's troops attacked the Taliban, Abdullah could not bear to stay in Ilford.

"I would consider myself a hypocrite if I lived in Britain while it was waging war against Afghanistan without doing anything about it," he said.

His mother, formerly of Uganda but now living in Britain, was initially reluctant, but "then the more she saw of the situation, the more she understood," Abdullah said.

Although he supported bin Laden and the Taliban, Abdullah had mixed feelings about the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the United States.

"The attack on the Pentagon was absolutely excellent," he said.

"It was a military installation and therefore a legitimate target, according to Islam."

However, he acknowledged that the Trade Center contained civilians and was not a military installation. Abdullah and another British Muslim planned to travel from Lahore to the Afghanistan border in the next few days, and they said "connections" would help them across.

Sunday Times reported that volunteers from Malaysia, Indonesia, China and Bangladesh eager to wage jihad were crossing the border with little difficulty. Efforts to establish from Foreign Affairs ministry whether there some Ugandan volunteers headed for Afghanistan were futile. But there were some protests against US led air strike on Afghanistan by some Uganda Muslims especially the Tabliq sect. The strike began Oct.7 after the Taliban regime failed to surrender the most wanted Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden who is the prime suspect in Sept.11 crash of the World Trade Center in New York and Pentagon in Washington.