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Investigative documents in the WikiLeaks probe spilled out into the public domain Saturday for the first time, pointing to the Obama administration's determination to assemble a criminal case no matter how long it takes and how far afield authorities have to go.

Backed by a magistrate judge's court order from Dec. 14, the newly disclosed documents sent to Twitter Inc. by the U.S. attorney's office in Alexandria, Va., demand details about the accounts of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who's in custody and suspected of supplying WikiLeaks with classified information.

The others whose Twitter accounts are targeted in the prosecutors' demand are Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian and one-time WikiLeaks collaborator; Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp; and U.S. programmer Jacob Appelbaum. Gonggrijp and Appelbaum have worked with WikiLeaks in the past.

Justice Department Matt Miller declined comment on the disclosure in the case, which intensified following WikiLeaks' latest round of revelations with the posting of classified State Department diplomatic cables. The next day, Nov. 29, Attorney General Eric Holder vowed that anyone found to have violated U.S. law in the leaks would be prosecuted.

Assange said the U.S. move amounted to harassment, and he pledged to fight it.

"If the Iranian government was to attempt to coercively obtain this information from journalists and activists of foreign nations, human rights groups around the world would speak out," he told The Associated Press in an e-mail.

Legal experts have said one possible avenue for federal prosecutors would be to establish a conspiracy to steal classified information.

"They are trying to show that Manning was more than a source of the information to a reporter and rather that Assange and Manning were trying to jointly steal information from the U.S. government," said Mark Rasch, a former prosecutor on computer crime and espionage cases in the Justice Department.

The problem is distinguishing between WikiLeaks as a news organization and those who re-published the same classified information, like The New York Times, said Rasch, director of cybersecurity and privacy consulting at CSC, a Falls Church, Virginia, technology company.

"How do they prosecute?" asked Rasch. "The answer is by establishing a unity of interest between Manning and Assange. Make it a theft case and not just a journalist publishing information case."

The demand by prosecutors sought information dating to Nov. 1, 2009, several months before an earlier WikiLeaks release.

Manning is in a maximum-security military brig at Quantico, Va., charged with leaking video of a 2007 U.S. Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a Reuters news photographer and his driver. WikiLeaks posted the video on its website in April of last year. Three months later, WikiLeaks posted some 90,000 leaked U.S. military records on the war in Afghanistan, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings as well as covert operations against Taliban figures.

The main target of the prosecutors' document demands is most likely the IP addresses of the Twitter users, said Stanford University law professor Larry Lessig, founder of the Center for Internet & Society, Stanford.

Getting a list of IP addresses — a specific code assigned to each computer that is recording as it visits websites — could help prosecutors an effort to draw specific connections between individuals, their computers, and the information they share.

"It's not very hard for an investigator to put these things together and come back and identify a specific individual," Lessig said.

In a statement about the demand to Twitter for information, WikiLeaks said it has reason to believe Facebook and Google, among other organizations, have received similar court orders. WikiLeaks called on them to unseal any subpoenas they have received.

The document demand ordered Twitter to hand over private messages, billing information, telephone numbers, connection records and other information about accounts run by Assange and the others.

A copy of the demand, sent to the AP by Jonsdottir, said the information sought was "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation" and ordered Twitter not to disclose its existence to any of the targets.

But a second document, dated Jan. 5, unsealed the court order. Although the reason wasn't made explicit in the document, WikiLeaks said it had been unsealed "thanks to legal action by Twitter."

Twitter declined comment on the matter, saying only that its policy is to notify its users, where possible, of government requests for information.

Neither Facebook Inc. nor Google Inc. immediately returned messages Saturday.

The Obama administration volunteered little new information about its criminal investigation against Assange and WikiLeaks after news of its subpoena leaked. Under rules governing grand jury investigations — in which U.S. prosecutors present evidence and testimony to selected private citizens behind closed doors to seek their approval to formally file charges — government lawyers are not allowed to discuss the case until charges are announced publicly.

It was not immediately clear how the data being requested would be useful to investigators. Twitter's logs could reveal the Internet addresses that Assange and WikiLeaks supporters have used, which could help track their locations as they traveled around the world. The information also might identify others with official access to WikiLeaks' account on Twitter who so far have escaped scrutiny.

Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens, said targeting Twitter showed how desperate U.S. officials were to pin a crime on the WikiLeaks founder.

Stephens told the BBC it was an attempt to "shake the electronic tree in the hope some kind of criminal charge drops out the bottom of it."

Jonsdottir said in a Twitter message that she had "no intention to hand my information over willingly." Appelbaum, whose Twitter feed suggested he was traveling in Iceland, said he was apprehensive about returning to the U.S.

"Time to try to enjoy the last of my vacation, I suppose," he tweeted.

Gonggrijp praised Twitter for notifying him.

"It appears that Twitter, as a matter of policy, does the right thing in wanting to inform their users when one of these comes in," Gonggrijp said. "Heaven knows how many places have received similar subpoenas and just quietly submitted all they had on me."

The news of the subpoena follows months of angry back and forth between U.S. officials and WikiLeaks, which has released reams of secret U.S. military documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and more recently, thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables.

U.S. officials say posting the military documents put informers' lives at risk, and that revealing diplomatic cables has made other countries reluctant to deal with American officials.

WikiLeaks denies that its postings put any lives at risk and says Washington merely is acting out of embarrassment over the revelations contained in the cables.

WikiLeaks and its tech-savvy staff have relied on American Internet and finance companies to raise funds, disseminate material and get their message out.

WikiLeaks' frequently updated Facebook page, for example, counts 1.5 million fans and its Twitter account has a following of more than 600,000. Until recently, the group raised donations via U.S. companies PayPal Inc., MasterCard Inc., and Visa Inc., and hosted material on Amazon.com's servers.

But the group's use of American companies has come under increasing pressure as it continues to reveal U.S. secrets. PayPal and the credit card companies severed their links with site and Amazon.com booted WikiLeaks from its servers last month.

The actions sparked a cyberfight with WikiLeaks sympathizers, who attacked the company's sites for days.

Assange is currently out on bail in Britain, where he is fighting extradition to Sweden on sex crimes allegations. His next hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.

The nation's caustic political climate has become a suspect of sorts in the rampage that left six dead and a lawmaker critically injured in Arizona. Already, appeals are being heard to tone down the rhetoric.

The captured suspect's motives remain unknown despite his online diatribes betraying resentment of the government and a scattered state of mind. Still, the attack on Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and those who were with has intensified the scrutiny on how much is too much, and how hot is too hot, in political debate.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Democratic leader in the Senate, on Sunday cited imagery of crosshairs on political opponents and Sarah Palin's combative rallying cry, "Don't retreat; reload."

"These sorts of things, I think, invite the kind of toxic rhetoric that can lead unstable people to believe this is an acceptable response," Durbin said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."

The attack might be the work of "a single nut," Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva, whose Arizona district shares Tucson with Giffords' district, said Saturday, the day Giffords was shot. But he said the nation must assess the fallout of "an atmosphere where the political discourse is about hate, anger and bitterness."

Still others cautioned against blaming political rhetoric - or the language and imagery of a particular political group - for the tragedy in Tucson. Republicans were especially sensitive to suggestions that the conservative tea party movement, with its anti-government stances, was contributing to a more poisonous political environment,

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., noted Sunday that the suspect in the Tucson rampage was connected to Internet postings that included Marxist and Nazi literature.

"That's not the profile of a typical tea party member, if that's the inference that's being made," he said on CNN.

Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, who ran as a tea party favorite, said on "Meet the Press" on NBC: "I just hope we can have some civility and move forward. You have extremes on both sides; you have crazy people on both sides. Your job as a leader is to talk to people in a rational way . to bring down the rhetoric".

The House's newly installed Republican leaders postponed Wednesday's scheduled vote to repeal the new health care law. That divisive issue was at the center of the harshest criticisms of Giffords and many other Democrats for the past two years.

The chief law enforcement official in the House, Sergeant-at-Arms Bill Livingood, said the Tucson attack did not appear to be part of a larger threat against Congress. Still, as a precaution, he advised each House member's office in an e-mail Saturday evening to get in touch with local law enforcement.

Washington and the nation have experienced a year or more of raw politics, with anger spilling over on both sides and gun-related metaphors coming loosely from the lips of some candidates and activists. Giffords, who had been a figurative target of the right, warned months ago that the verbal assaults were beyond the pale and could have dire results.

In Pima County, Ariz., Sheriff Clarence Dupnik suggested "all this vitriol" in recent discourse might be connected to Saturday's shootings. "This may be free speech," he told reporters, "but it's not without consequences."

Jonathan Cowan, president of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, said: "We do know that politics has become too personal, too nasty and perhaps too dangerous. Perhaps out of this senseless act some sense can return to our public discourse."

Many lawmakers, especially Democrats, felt the 2009-2010 debate over health care sometimes got out of hand. It began with emotional town hall meetings in the summer of 2009, when some critics warned of government "death panels."

Giffords, 40, was among lawmakers who reported 42 threats or acts or vandalism in the first three months of 2010, a big increase over the previous year, law enforcement officers said. Nearly all the threats dealt with the massive health care bill that Giffords and other Democrats enacted over fierce Republican opposition.

In March, someone kicked in or shot out a glass door and side window at Giffords' office in Tucson, a few hours after the House passed the health care measure with her help.

Giffords also was among about 20 Democrats opposed in last fall's elections by Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee. Palin's Facebook page in March posted a U.S. map with the cross-hairs of a gun scope imposed over each of the 20 Democrats' districts. Gun imagery appeared in various ways in the campaign, often not connected at all with gun rights.

"We're on Sarah Palin's targeted list," Giffords said at the time. "The way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they've got to realize there are consequences to that action."

Palin's Facebook page after the shooting extended condolences to Giffords' family and the other victims.

The suspected gunman, Jared Loughner, complained about the government online and spoke of matters involving currency, terrorism and "mind control." But what might have driven him to violence has not been established.

"We don't yet know what provoked this unspeakable act," President Barack Obama said Saturday from the White House. "We are going to get to the bottom of this."

Obama said he's dispatched the head of the FBI to Arizona to oversee the investigation.

In a dusty square flanked by two churches, Southern Sudanese lined up before dawn -- many in their Sunday best -- to vote in a historic referendum that they say is a vote for their freedom.

Mary Dennis arrived at 4:30 a.m. to secure her spot near the front of the line.

"I had to come early," Dennis said. "This is a vote for our country."

Edwina Loria, 18, was determined to cast her ballot.

"I want to be a first-class citizen," she said, "I want independence."
And John Baptiste and his friend showed up before 4 a.m. They sat on the ground with a radio to monitor news of this historic day.

"I am on a mission," he says, "My mission is to vote. We have waited for 50 years, and we want to be separate. We have planned for many days to be here first."

Beginning Sunday, black Christians and animists in the autonomous region of Southern Sudan will vote on whether to declare independence from the northern government dominated by Arab Muslims.

Even police officers, many of whom recently recruited to secure the voting, couldn't hold back the euphoria.

"This is such a big day for us, it is the first time we have hope for South Sudan," Ajak Awach Deng said in his new camouflage uniform. "We want freedom, we want our new country and to build our nation."

But reports of violence on Saturday in the south have left many observers and residents keeping their fingers crossed for what they hope is a peaceful voting period and a seamless transition to the formation of a new country.

Southern Sudanese people who lived in the north for decades were streaming into their homeland by river and land to vote in a referendum that observers say will favor independence.

Thabo Mbeki, the former South African president who is the chairman of the African Union High Level Implementation Panel on Sudan, told CNN there's a sense of optimism among Southern Sudanese ahead of the vote.

"For them, this is a moment of liberation," he said.

John Duku, a Southern Sudanese diplomat, said unity, or one undivided Sudanese nation, "means only one thing, it means war."

He said that "over the years unity has imposed war on us, the unity has imposed marginalization on us, the unity has imposed slavery on us. So, what is the meaning of unity. For the people of South Sudan it means only war."

The two sides fought a war that killed some 2 million people from 1983 to 2005, when a peace treaty set the stage for the upcoming vote.

Mbeki said the tragic aspect of Sudanese history is that relations between the north and the south "have never been relations of equality," and that's the reason the country endured a long civil war.

He said that people in Sudan have to redefine and reconstruct the relations between the north and south after the referendum takes place.

But deadly skirmishes have erupted along the north-south area involving Southern Sudan forces, the latest incidents along the disputed area in the past months and years.

Four rebel soldiers were killed and six captured in an attempted ambush on the forces, the Sudanese People's Liberation Army said in a statement Saturday.

Militias under the operation of rebel commander Galwak Gai led an ambush Saturday morning on SPLA soldiers in the border region's Unity State, but were repelled, according to the army.

The SPLA accused the rebels of trying to disrupt the referendum.

On Friday, the Sudan People's Liberation Army ambushed and captured 26 rebel troops in Mayom County of Unity State.

There has been fighting in the Abyei region, a contested border area and friction point in the north-south border region.

Wour Mijak, spokesman for the Sudan People's Liberation Movement in Abyei, said police on Friday intercepted militias of the nomadic Arab tribe, the Misseriya, and skirmishing ensued. One police officer and four members of the militia were killed and six of the militia were injured. Skirmishes continued Saturday, he said.

The SPLM is the governing party of the southern region.

But Hamadi al-Dudu, a Misseriya tribal leader, said Misseriya herders were grazing their cattle in the area of Umbalayil and they were set upon by the Southern Sudanese forces in cars with heavy weaponry.

"It was an unprovoked attack. Our people fought back," al-Dudu said.

The south has repeatedly accused the north of trying to stoke tension by supporting rebels troops to destabilize the south, an allegation the Khartoum government denies.

The January 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Sudanese government and the main rebel group in the south, the SPLM, called for the referendum.

It also envisioned a vote in Abyei, an oil-rich area that the British transferred to northern Sudan in 1905. The agreement says people in Abyei should vote on whether to remain part of the north or return to the south.

Both sides were to have worked out many details by now, but that has not happened, delaying the referendum in Abyei.

A gunman nearly unloaded a semiautomatic weapon at a busy supermarket Saturday during a public gathering for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, wounding the Democrat and killing Arizona's chief federal judge and five others in an attempted assassination that left Americans questioning whether divisive politics had pushed the suspect over the edge.

The shooting targeted Giffords and left the three-term congresswoman in critical condition after a bullet passed through her head. A shaken President Barack Obama called the attack "a tragedy for our entire country."

Giffords, 40, is a moderate Democrat who narrowly won re-election in November against a tea party candidate who sought to throw her from office over her support of the health care law. Anger over her position became violent at times, with her Tucson office vandalized after the House passed the overhaul last March and someone showing up at a recent gathering with a weapon.
Police say the shooter was in custody, and was identified by people familiar with the investigation as Jared Loughner, 22. U.S. officials who provided his name to the AP spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release it publicly.

His motivation was not immediately known, but Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik described him as mentally unstable and possibly acting with an accomplice.

Dupnik said Giffords was among 13 people wounded in the melee that killed six people — including 9-year-old Christina Greene, 30-year-old Gifford aide Gabe Zimmerman, and U.S. District Judge John Roll. The 63-year-old judge had just stopped by to see his friend Giffords after attending Mass. Dupnik said the rampage ended only after two people tackled the gunman. Also killed were 76-year-old Dorthy Murray, 76-year-old Dorwin Stoddard, and 79-year-old Phyllis Scheck, investigators said.

The sheriff blamed the vitriolic political rhetoric that has consumed the country, much of it occurring in Arizona.

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," he said. "And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

Giffords expressed similar concern, even before the shooting. In an interview after her office was vandalized, she referred to the animosity against her by conservatives, including Sarah Palin's decision to list Giffords' seat as one of the top "targets" in the midterm elections.

"For example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they have to realize that there are consequences to that action," Giffords said in an interview with MSNBC.

In the hours after the shooting, Palin issued a statement in which she expressed her "sincere condolences" to the family of Giffords and the other victims.

During his campaign effort to unseat Giffords in November, Republican challenger Jesse Kelly held fundraisers where he urged supporters to help remove Giffords from office by joining him to shoot a fully loaded M-16 rifle. Kelly is a former Marine who served in Iraq and was pictured on his website in military gear holding his automatic weapon and promoting the event.

"I don't see the connection," between the fundraisers featuring weapons and Saturday's shooting, said John Ellinwood, Kelly's spokesman. "I don't know this person, we cannot find any records that he was associated with the campaign in any way. I just don't see the connection.

"Arizona is a state where people are firearms owners — this was just a deranged individual."

Law enforcement officials said members of Congress reported 42 cases of threats or violence in the first three months of 2010, nearly three times the 15 cases reported during the same period a year earlier. Nearly all dealt with the health care bill, and Giffords was among the targets.

The shooting cast a pall over the Capitol as politicians of all stripes denounced the attack as a horrific. Capitol police asked members of Congress to be more vigilant about security in the wake of the shooting. Obama dispatched his FBI chief to Arizona.

Giffords, known as "Gabby," tweeted shortly before the shooting, describing her "Congress on Your Corner" event: "My 1st Congress on Your Corner starts now. Please stop by to let me know what is on your mind or tweet me later."

"It's not surprising that today Gabby was doing what she always does, listening to the hopes and concerns of her neighbors," Obama said. "That is the essence of what our democracy is about."

Mark Kimball, a communications staffer for Giffords, described the scene as "just complete chaos, people screaming, crying." The gunman fired at Giffords and her district director and started shooting indiscriminately at staffers and others standing in line to talk to the congresswoman, Kimball said.
"He was not more than three or four feet from the congresswoman and the district director," he said.

Doctors were optimistic about Giffords surviving as she was responding to commands from doctors. "With guarded optimism, I hope she will survive, but this is a very devastating wound," said Dr. Richard Carmona, the former surgeon general who lives in Tucson.

Giffords spokesman C.J. Karamargin said three Giffords staffers were shot. One died, and the other two are expected to survive. Gabe Zimmerman, a former social worker who served as Giffords' director of community outreach, died. Giffords had worked with the judge in the past to line up funding to build a new courthouse in Yuma, and Obama hailed him for his nearly 40 years of service.
An uncle of the 9-year-old girl told the Arizona Republic that a neighbor was going to the event and invited her along because she had just been elected to the student council and was interested in government.

A former classmate described Loughner as a pot-smoking loner, and the Army said he tried to enlist in December 2008 but was rejected for reasons not disclosed.

Federal law enforcement officials were poring over versions of a MySpace page that included a mysterious "Goodbye friends" message published hours before the shooting and exhorted his friends to "Please don't be mad at me."

In one of several Youtube videos, which featured text against a dark background, Loughner described inventing a new U.S. currency and complained about the illiteracy rate among people living in Giffords' congressional district in Arizona.

"I know who's listening: Government Officials, and the People," Loughner wrote. "Nearly all the people, who don't know this accurate information of a new currency, aren't aware of mind control and brainwash methods. If I have my civil rights, then this message wouldn't have happen (sic)."

In Loughner's middle-class neighborhood — about a five-minute drive from the scene — sheriff's deputies had much of the street blocked off. The neighborhood sits just off a bustling Tucson street and is lined with desert landscaping and palm trees.

Neighbors said Loughner lived with his parents and kept to himself. He was often seen walking his dog, almost always wearing a hooded sweat shirt and listening to his iPod.

Loughner's MySpace profile indicates he attended and graduated from school in Tucson and had taken college classes. He did not say if he was employed.

"We're getting out of here. We are freaked out," 33-year-old David Cleveland, who lives a few doors down from Loughner's house, told The Associated Press.

Cleveland said he was taking his wife and children, ages 5 and 7, to her parent's home when they heard about the shooting.

"When we heard about it, we just got sick to our stomachs," Cleveland said. "We just wanted to hold our kids tight."

High school classmate Grant Wiens, 22, said Loughner seemed to be "floating through life" and "doing his own thing."

"Sometimes religion was brought up or drugs. He smoked pot, I don't know how regularly. And he wasn't too keen on religion, from what I could tell," Wiens said.

Lynda Sorenson said she took a math class with Loughner last summer at Pima Community College's Northwest campus and told the Arizona Daily Star he was "obviously very disturbed." ''He disrupted class frequently with nonsensical outbursts," she said.

In October 2007, Loughner was cited in Pima County for possession of drug paraphernalia, which was dismissed after he completed a diversion program, according to online records.

"He has kind of a troubled past, I can tell you that," Dupnik said.

Giffords was first elected to Congress amid a wave of Democratic victories in the 2006 election, and has been mentioned as a possible Senate candidate in 2012 and a gubernatorial prospect in 2014.

She is married to astronaut Mark E. Kelly, who has piloted space shuttles Endeavour and Discovery. The two met in China in 2003 while they were serving on a committee there, and were married in January 2007. Sen. Bill Nelson, chairman of the Senate Commerce Space and Science Subcommittee, said Kelly is training to be the next commander of the space shuttle mission slated for April. His brother is currently serving aboard the International Space Station, Nelson said.

Giffords is known in her southern Arizona district for her numerous public outreach meetings, which she acknowledged in an October interview with The Associated Press can sometimes be challenging.

"You know, the crazies on all sides, the people who come out, the planet earth people," she said with a following an appearance with Adm. Mike Mullen in which the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was peppered with bizarre questions from an audience member. "I'm glad this just doesn't happen to me."

The price of fuel has risen sharply in parts of Afghanistan as an Iranian-imposed slowdown on tanker traffic at key border crossings has stretched into its second month, Afghan officials say.
The slowdown has increased the price of refined fuel by more than 50 percent in some provinces, forced gas stations on major highways to close and driven up the costs of other basic commodities, including food and heating oil, just as winter is setting in. The bottleneck is also hurting farmers in the south who depend on diesel pumps for irrigation.

The issue threatens to strain relations between Afghanistan and Iran, and adds yet another obstacle to President Hamid Karzai and NATO forces as they try to rebuild the economy and provide government services in the face of a resurgent Taliban.

It also presents new logistical and security challenges for the government and private fuel brokers as they look to ease the shortage by increasing tanker traffic through northern borders with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. That would require moving the fuel down long, dangerous highways to Afghanistan’s southern provinces, where the fuel crisis and the insurgency have been the most intense.

Hundreds of fuel tankers are stranded at the country’s main border crossings with Iran, stopped by Iranian border agents, and the number making it across has slowed to a trickle. About 40 tankers a day are crossing the border at Herat, Farah and Nimruz Provinces, compared with 250 to 330 a day before, according to commerce and customs officials.

About 40 percent of Afghanistan’s fuel comes through Iran, on its western border, although most of it does not originate there.

Afghan officials say that the Iranian authorities have told them they have been blocking the trucks out of concern that the fuel is being used by NATO military forces in Afghanistan, an assertion that NATO and the Afghan government deny.

“The national security team of the Iranian government has decided that coalition and NATO forces are using this fuel for their own use,” Faridullah Sherzai, head of the Afghan Commerce Ministry’s fuel department, said Saturday. “The Iranians want to place some restrictions to ensure these fuels are not used for military forces, but these fuels are not used by NATO forces at all, they are used by civilians in everyday life.”

Feda Hussein Maliki, Iran’s ambassador in Kabul, acknowledged that Iran was concerned that fuel was supporting NATO forces, but insisted that it was not blocking the border.

“Some media have said that Iran has stopped importing fuel to people of Afghanistan,” he told reporters last week. “This is not true. We do give fuel to people of Afghanistan, and this is included in our plans.”

Officials in Tehran referred questions about the issue on Sunday to their Foreign Ministry, which said it was not available for comment.

The slowdown began in early December as the Iranian authorities blocked as many as 2,500 fuel tankers from crossing the border, Mr. Sherzai said. Most of the fuel they are carrying is not Iranian, he added, but comes from Turkmenistan and Iraq.

After a meeting in Tehran late last month between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and several high-level Afghan officials, including the first vice president, the flow eased somewhat, Mr. Sherzai said. But it remains only a fraction of what it was.

At Pul-i-Abrishamin in Nimruz Province, one of the main border crossings with Iran, hundreds of trucks were waiting to cross on Sunday, but officials said they expected only about 15 to make it through by day’s end. The slowdown there has cost the Afghan government tens of thousands of dollars in lost customs fees, said Elhamuddin Mazhar, the chief of the local customs office.

The cost of refined fuel, meanwhile, has increased by 53 percent in Nimruz, to $1,500 a ton from $980 a ton, said Hajji Ubidullah Noorzai, head of the Nimruz Chamber of Commerce.

He estimated that 80 percent of gas stations in the province had temporarily shut down. “Especially on the highways connecting Nimruz with the rest of the provinces,” he said. “There are only a handful of petrol stations that are selling fuel.”

Though the cultivation season is largely over in much of the south, agriculture is taking a hit in the areas where wheat production is still under way.

“Yesterday I had four or five farmers come to my office and ask for help,” said Mohammed Akbar Sharifi, head of the Nimruz Province Agriculture Department. “They said they are no longer able to work on their tractors and pump water due to the high fuel prices.”
At Islam Qala, the main border crossing in Herat Province, 21 fuel tankers crossed the border on Wednesday and 42 on Thursday, said Khaliqullah, the head of customs there, who goes by one name, as many Afghans do. By midafternoon Saturday, only five had crossed, he said.
“On a regular day 100 to 150 cross our border,” he said.

Customs officials in Nimruz and Herat say their Iranian counterparts have assured them the issue will be cleared up as early as Tuesday or Wednesday, but Mr. Sherzai said he did not expect a quick resolution. He said the government had begun efforts to increase imports through other borders.

Some local agricultural officials worried that if fuel costs remained high, they could drive farmers to cultivate poppies, a more cost-effective crop as opium prices have soared. At the least, higher fuel costs could make it more difficult for NATO and government officials to persuade poppy producers to shift to alternative crops.

“If the fuel ban continues by Iran’s government for months, and the fuel price keeps going up and up, there is a possibility the farmers would resort back to poppy,” said Ahmad Shah Roshan, head of the Agriculture Department in Kandahar Province.

“Nobody would be able to stop them,” Mr. Sharifi of Nimruz Province, said separately, “since poppy needs less water and makes good money.”

Muhammad Aslam, a farmer and landlord in the Maywand District of Kandahar Province, said in a phone interview that fuel prices were a “big deal” for local farmers that could have long-term consequences.

“Most of the bore wells are not operating due to the prices of fuel, and farmers are unable to buy fuel,” he said. “There are some people who do have some budget to buy fuel with this current price, but most of the farmers are unable to buy. We want the government to help us in this regard and not to let our trees and farms go dry. The government should have a proper contract to import fuel from other countries.”

The price increase has also been felt at the kitchen table.

“Buying one jar or bottle of cooking oil used to be 900 Afghanis, but now it has gone up to 1,250 Afghanis,” Mr. Aslam said. “These are the things that we use in our daily life, and living has become more difficult with these high prices. From one side we are worried how we are going to water our farms and from other side we have to feed ourselves.”