Taleban prepare for fight to the death in Kunduz and Kandahar

16 Nov, 2001 02:41 AM5 mins to read

3:00 pm

With almost two-thirds of Afghanistan now under opposition control, thousands of bin Laden's Arab troops and Taleban fighters were surrounded in the northern city of Kunduz, facing a fight to the death, while others were under siege in the city of Kandahar, their last southern redoubt.

In Kunduz, in the north, thousands of fighters - many of them Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens - were under siege, the opposition said. These foreign fighters have have spent years fighting under the umbrella of bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

"There are 20,000 Taleban in Kunduz, many of them Arabs, and they are trying to break out," said one Northern Alliance defence official in Dushanbe, the capital of neighbouring Tajikistan.

"They are desperate, they've seen what happens to Arabs when the Northern Alliance gets hold of them," he said.

But top US officials gave a more conservative estimate of 2,000 to 3,000 "hard-core" soldiers.

In Kandahar, Taleban fighters made a stand to defend the city that has been their stronghold, despite a withering US aerial bombardment.

Reports from the area and from US officials spoke of anti-Taleban revolts there, and fighting in the city itself.

A group of tribal leaders from southern Afghanistan was trying to negotiate some kind of arrangement to avoid bloodshed and warned the Northern Alliance not to try to take the city.

But as they retreated from city after city Taleban leaders were insisting that they are regrouping to fight another day.

The new war, they said, will be a guerrilla one - a form of fighting they did not experience when they swept through the country in the 1990s.

Then it was the opposition that fell apart as commanders were bought off or defected to it. Now the same thing is happening in reverse.

The former mujahedin fighters among the Taleban, as well as the Afghan-Arabs who fought alongside them, will remember the hit-and-run tactics that saw off the Russians in the 1980s, and will now be hoping to administer the same treatment to the US and British forces when they arrive. In this kind of warfare, technological superiority counts for little.

The fighters of the Taleban and their al Qaeda allies, said to number around 40,000, will head into the hills to carry out hit-and-run attacks. This, however, will take them northwards from Kandahar, towards the enemy. South of the city there is nothing but open desert, in which it is impossible to find cover.

The Taleban believe they will receive reinforcements in this new war from across the Pakistani border from fellow Pashtuns and also fresh waves of international Islamist volunteers. But despite claims to the contrary, this has never been the grand plan of their leaders, Mullah Mohammed Omar and Osama bin Laden. The change of tactics has been forced upon them from the success of the Allied tactics, the scale and speed of which surprised even military commanders in Washington and London.

But there had been some hiccups for the Allies on the way to victory. The one and only ground attack by US Rangers, a purely cosmetic exercise for the media on a supposedly poorly defended target, ended in near disaster when the Taleban fought back.

Nor did the initial burst of air strikes lead to the Taleban leadership wilting and handing over Mr bin Laden.

These shortcomings made the planners in Washington and London rethink and accept that the Northern Alliance must be helped, despite the strong objections of General Pervez Musharraf's Pakistani regime. American and British special forces were sent in to co-ordinate the various commanders, plan attacks and, most importantly, call down air strikes.

The scale of the air strikes increased dramatically, the number of aircraft often rising to more than a hundred, compared to 40 in the first day, and the Taleban front line being subjected to carpet bombing, and the dropping of "daisy cutters", the most potent conventional weapons in the US arsenal.

The Taleban not only lost their air force and almost all their armour, but also communications. Within three weeks all radio traffic had ceased and the regime's commanders were forced to rely on passing on messages manually, often via horseback.

As the Taleban and the al Quad's arms and equipment deteriorated, those of the opposition Northern Alliance improved. The Russians, with the backing of the US and Britain, supplied 50 T55 and T62 tanks to supplement the 30 they had. In the west, the Shi Muslim commander MSMail Khan received fresh supplies from the Iranians.

Now, Mr bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership may attempt to head for another country. German troops were yesterday said to be in position in Somalia, in case they head there, and security has been similarly tightened in Yemen, the bin Laden home before they found their wealth in Saudi Arabia.

If such avenues are cut off, Mr bin Laden and his closest followers are likely to attempt to cross the Pakistani border, where they are likely to find refuge among Pashtun sympathisers and may get protection from members of Pakistan's military intelligence service, the ISI.

Mullah Omar's followers appear to be heading south from Kabul and east from Kandahar. As they attempt to go to the hills of the north and the central highlands they, too, may attempt to infiltrate across the Pakistani border to avoid Allied air attacks. There is always the danger that elements of the Northern Alliance will set off in "hot pursuit" with the danger of the conflagration spreading.

- INDEPENDENT, REUTERS

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