The United Nations top refugee official left the Taleban headquarters in southern Afghanistan yesterday without the temporary truce he was seeking, but praising the Islamic militia for virtually wiping out the production of opium, which is used to make heroin. Ruud Lubbers, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, told reporters that the powerful governor of southern Kandahar, Mullah Mohammed Hasan, promised to take his appeal for a temporary ceasefire to the Taleban's reclusive leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and to Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil. He said one good sign was a report by the United Nations Drug Control Programme that the Taleban have virtually eliminated poppies - the plant from which opium is extracted and made into heroin. Until this year Afghanistan was the world's largest producer of opium, harvesting 4,000 tonnes last year - more than the combined production of every other opium-producing country in the world. Last week an incredulous international community sent inspectors from several countries, including two inspectors from the United States, into Afghanistan to verify the United Nations claim. So far inspectors say they have found only the occasional crimson red poppy plant, from which opium is produced. Yesterday in Kandahar one of the inspectors, Guillaume Blanc, said his team crisscrossed southern Helmand province, where 50 per cent of all of Afghanistan's poppies were grown. They found two plants. "In all of Helmand we found only two plants. Helmand produces 50 per cent of all the opium produced in Afghanistan," said Mr Blanc, who works with the UN Special Mission on Afghanistan. "It's true they are not growing poppies." (Reuters)