Taleban birthplace falls

8 Dec, 2001 01:21 AM4 mins to read

KABUL - The Taleban yesterday began surrendering Kandahar, their final bastion and birthplace, and the country's new leader said he would hand over its leaders and their foreign allies to "international justice".

With the Taleban having finally disintegrated after weeks of pulverising United States air strikes, the US can concentrate on hunting down its most wanted man, Osama bin Laden.

Anti-Taleban forces say they have captured bin Laden's main base in the Tora Bora mountains of eastern Afghanistan, but failed to find the Saudi-born militant, blamed for hijacked airliner attacks that killed nearly 4000 in the United States.

The Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press said Taleban fighters began handing in their weapons to a commission of tribal elders, Islamic scholars and former mujahadeen commanders in Kandahar, the city where the hardline movement began a march to power seven years ago.

Some reports spoke of widespread looting of civilian property and relief agency warehouses in the old royal capital, once the site of a fortress built by Alexander the Great 2300 years ago.

AIP said the Taleban had also surrendered in the southwestern province of Helmand and the border town of Spin Boldak, the final death knell for the hardline movement that has now been ousted from all but a few remote pockets.

Hamid Karzai, the Pashtun tribal chief named to lead a new interim government and who reached a deal with the Taleban on Thursday for the peaceful handover of Kandahar, said he could not confirm the surrender had actually begun.

But he said Taleban leader Mullah Omar and his aides must face trial for their crimes. He had given an amnesty to rank-and-file Taleban, but not to the militia's top leaders and foreigners loyal to the Taleban or bin Laden's shadowy al Qaeda network.

"We have the strictest measures against them and we will hand them to international justice," said Karzai. "We are absolutely committed to make them stand trial and face justice. They must pay for their crimes."

The whereabouts of the one-eyed Omar, who had been urging his black-turbaned warriors to fight to the death rather than give up the bomb-blasted southern city, were not known.

The reclusive 42-year-old has seldom left his compound on the outskirts of Kandahar and shunned non-Muslims in his brand of radical Islam.

Only a few fuzzy photographs exist of him - the Taleban banned them along with television, music and "entertainments".

The Taleban surrender was to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour - December 7, 1941. US President George Bush was to commemorate the event by drawing parallels with the "date which will live in infamy" and the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

In eastern Afghanistan, anti-Taleban forces said they had seized bin Laden's main stronghold in the cave-riddled Tora Bora area after fierce fighting, but failed to find him.

Mohammad Habeel, a spokesman for the militarily dominant Northern Alliance, said: "Osama was not in Tora Bora during the past days of fighting and if he had been he has probably slipped into Pakistan."

The US Navy is scouring the world's oceans and ports for 23 merchant ships identified by US and Norwegian intelligence agencies as owned or controlled by al Qaeda.

In Berlin, Western aid donors played down fears that the Afghan power-sharing pact was unravelling as a top United Nations official said at least $US600 million ($1.44 billion) worth of relief was needed from next March.

Traditional rivalries among anti-Taleban factions threaten to split the new interim administration before it has even met.

Cajoled by diplomats and promises of billions of aid dollars, anti-Taleban Afghan groups have agreed to govern the country together for six months starting from December 22.

But warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose forces dominate northern Afghanistan, said his ethnic Uzbek faction was not fairly represented in the new administration.

- REUTERS

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