Taleban close to losing Kandahar stronghold

14 Nov, 2001 03:32 AM5 mins to read

4:00 pm

KABUL/WASHINGTON – The morning after anti-Taleban forces captured the Afghan capital Kabul, there are reports of rapid-fire gains in the Islamists' southern heartland with the Taleban stronghold of Kandahar said to be on the brink of falling.

Witnesses arriving in Pakistan said thousands of anti-Taleban tribal fighters had seized an airport in the former royal capital and were advancing on Kandahar.

Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said the Taleban were no longer in control of the city.

"Taleban authorities are not seen in Kandahar so the people are left in an open situation," he said, adding the situation was similar to that left in Kabul by the retreating Taleban.

Opposition leaders said Kandahar could fall within 24 hours as moderate Taleban forces abandoned the hard-liners.

The retreating Taleban took with them eight Western aid workers being held on charges of promoting Christianity.

Meanwhile, despite the opposition gains - and a $11.8 million price on his head - there was no word on Osama bin Laden, whom US President George Bush has said he wants "dead or alive."

The Saudi-born militant was last reported to be in the Kabul region by a Pakistani journalist who interviewed him last week and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said he was probably now in the Kandahar area.

Other anti-Taleban fighters reached the Afghan border post at the Torkham crossing to Pakistan at the western end of the fabled Khyber Pass, a Reuters cameraman said.

In the west, an anti-Taleban spokesman said opposition commander Ismail Khan entered the ancient city of Herat, his former power base, with 4,000 fighters at dawn today.

And in the southwest an anti-Taleban warlord said his forces had captured Nimruz province, which borders Iran.

As Taleban rule appeared in tatters, their supreme leader Mullah Omar urged his scattered fighters to stand and fight.

"I order you to completely obey your commanders and not to go hither and thither," the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press quoted him as saying to his troops in an address in the Pashto language over their wireless sets. "Any person who goes hither and thither is like a slaughtered chicken which falls and dies. You should regroup yourselves, resist and fight."

International attention has turned toward forming a broad-based government in Kabul to head off ethnic clashes.

Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy for Afghanistan, said UN political personnel had been asked to go to Kabul immediately, beginning with his deputy Francesc Vendrell, now in Pakistan.

Brahimi said there were three choices, the best of which was an "all-Afghan" security force. If this were not possible, he proposed a multinational force, which diplomats said could include Muslim troops from Turkey and Jordan as well as European forces.

The third and worst choice he said was a traditional UN peacekeeping force, which would take months to organise.

Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah said his fighters had only entered Kabul to maintain security. He welcomed UN involvement and called on all Afghan groups to come to Kabul to discuss a future administration, adding, "Taleban excluded."

Northern Alliance leader Burhanuddin Rabbani, who as Afghan president was driven from Kabul by the Taleban in 1996, said he would return to Kabul on Wednesday.

In Rome, a senior adviser to Afghanistan's exiled former King Zahir Shah, seen as a key player in the country's political future, said the Northern Alliance had broken an agreement by entering Kabul but an Alliance spokesman called on Zahir Shah to send a delegation for talks on a new government.

With reports of reprisal killings coming in, President Bush warned the Northern Alliance not to loot, pillage or kill prisoners in Kabul. He said US troops would keep supporting their offensive, although he had earlier insisted they not enter the capital.

Bush suggested the reports of Northern Alliance reprisals might be exaggerated and said he had seen a report of Taleban forces "wreaking havoc" on their way out of Kabul.

"Before we jump to conclusions we want to make sure we understand what the facts are," he said, adding that "the evacuating (Taleban) army is one that has terrorised this country for a long period of time."

Regional analysts said a blood letting could make it much more difficult to govern the country and might complicate US efforts to find and punish bin Laden.

In Kabul, Arab and Chechen fighters loyal to bin Laden clambered into trees to fire on opposition troops. They were shot and their bodies hung in branches or lay on the ground.

In one city park the bloody bodies of seven black-turbaned Taleban militia lay dead, apparently executed with bullets to the head. Bank notes were stuffed in their noses and ears and children spat on the corpses.

At Bagram airport, north of Kabul, some of the US special forces who coordinated the anti-Taleban advance - wearing civilian clothes and sunglasses and carrying M-16 assault rifles - inspected Northern Alliance positions.

Kabul residents were nervous. Shops were closed and pick-up trucks filled with anti-Taleban soldiers armed with rifles and shoulder-held rocket launchers patrolled the streets.

"Nobody who knows the Afghans would not have expected a little bit of looting and pillaging and shooting of prisoners," said Stephen Cohen, a South Asia scholar at the Brookings Institution think tank. "It's distasteful but the Afghans have been doing this for several centuries."

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