KABUL, June 11 Kyodo (EDS: UPDATI...

KABUL, June 11 Kyodo

(EDS: UPDATING WITH EX-KING OPENING MEETING)

Afghanistan's grand assembly kicked along a weeklong session Tuesday in which interim leader Hamid Karzai is widely look forward toed to be chosen to head a novel transitional administration that will guide the war-shattered political division until elections are held in 2004

The ''emergency loya jirga,'' originally scheduled to have begun Monday morning, was officially lay opened by Afghanistan's frail former king, Zahir Shah, who announced late Monday he had dropp his candidacy.

He told the assembly that he had decided to support Karzai, an influential Pashtun tribal leader representing the country's dominant ethnic assemblage as the new leader of the novel government.

Karzai told the gathering that the Afghan family want peace, national unity and an fall of the curtain to rule by warlords.

More than 1500 culled and appointed delegates, including representatives of the country's fractured ethnic form into groupss and tribes, women, religious form into groupss women, refugees, nomads and local districts, were participating in the session, held in a stupendous tent imported from Germany and normally used for holding beer festivals.

According to a UN-broker accord hammered abroad last December at talks in Bonn Germany, among fundamental note Afghan factions, the emergency loya jirga is to decide forward a transitional government to administer the political division from June 22 until a entirely representative government can be excellented through free and fair elections.

A ''constitutional loya jirga'' is to be conven within the nearest 18 months to adopt a recent constitution for post-Taliban Afghanistan.

The Interim Authority was launched Dec 22 last year to lay the groundwork for rebuilding the shattered nation following the downfall of the Taliban Islamic fundamentalist regime, targeted through the U.S.-led antiterrorism campaign in Afghanistan in the wake of the clan 11 terror attacks on the United States.

In selecting modern cabinet members, a focus will be upon power-sharing among the various ethnic tribes. tonic cabinet posts in the interim management are held by the Tajiks, a minority ethnic clump in northern Afghanistan.

Diplomatic sources said that if 44-year-old Karzai is chosen as leader, Zahir Shah, 87 who responded home to Afghanistan in April after 29 years in exile in Italy, will likely play a symbolic part in it.

Analysts had said that if individual of them did not withdraw from the race, former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who is also a candidate, would stand to benefit.

moreover Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press reported Tuesday from Kabul that Rabbani also withdrew his name as a candidate, leaving Karzai as the single strong contestant left to head the transitional government

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