KABUL - Taleban fighters in the besieged Afghan enclave of Kunduz were trying to negotiate a surrender yesterday as United States planes bombed the militia's remaining strongholds and ground forces hunted for militant fugitive Osama bin Laden.
Reports at Pakistan's southwest border with Afghanistan said the Taleban were still firmly in control of Kandahar, home of their supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, despite 45 days of withering US-led aerial attacks on the fundamentalist militia.
But in Kunduz in the north, where thousands of Afghan Taleban fighters and Pakistani, Arab and Chechen comrades linked to bin Laden's al Qaeda network are encircled by opposition Northern Alliance troops, the Taleban were seeking to end the fighting.
Taleban commanders have said they are willing to surrender to the United Nations but will not give up the city to the Northern Alliance.
The alliance, who halted their assault on Kunduz on Monday, say they will guarantee the safety of Afghan fighters if they surrender, but not the foreign guerrillas fighting with them.
The opposition says al Qaeda troops are fighting to the death, knowing they have no alternative, and are executing Afghan comrades who want to surrender. The reports could not be independently verified.
"The UN should intervene," the Taleban's sole ambassador, Pakistan envoy Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, said.
"Whether they will surrender to the UN or not, I don't have full information."
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he was against any deal that would let the defenders of Kunduz escape.
"My hope is that they will either be killed or taken prisoner," he said.
"Any idea that those people ... should end up in some sort of a negotiation which would allow them to leave the country and go off and destabilise other countries and engage in terrorist attacks on the United States is something that I would certainly do everything I could to prevent."
Zaeef said the Taleban were still firmly in control in their stronghold of Kandahar in the south, in the centre of the ethnic Pashtun territory from where the militia draws most of its support.
The Taleban have dismissed reports that they would hand over control of Kandahar to local mujahideen commanders.
An opposition tribal delegation that visited Kandahar last week said the Taleban had considered handing over power but this was scuppered when Omar revealed he had had a prophetic vision.
"I have had a dream in which I am in charge for as long as I live," Ahmed Karzai, brother of opposition tribal chief Hamid Karzai, quoted Mullah Omar as saying.
Underlining the ethnic divisions that fracture Afghanistan and make building a new government so difficult, anti-Taleban Pashtun leaders in the south are trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the militia and have warned the Northern Alliance - dominated by minority Uzbeks and Tajiks - to stay away.
US-led special forces are searching territory near Kandahar for bin Laden, alleged mastermind of the September 11 hijacked airliner attacks in the US that killed some 4600 people.
But the Saudi-born fugitive remains at large, and the Taleban say he is no longer in territory they control.
- REUTERS
Story archives:
Links: War against terrorism
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
Taleban seek flight from Kunduz
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
