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Opposition Forces Claim Strategic Gains in Northern Afghanistan
KABUL, Sept 23 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Opposition forces in northern Afghanistan claimed Sunday to have re-captured a strategic district from the ruling Taliban movement, as the threat of U.S. military strikes on the country continued to loom.
Abdul Rashid Dostam, one of the most powerful leaders in the anti-Taliban opposition movement, said his forces had ousted the Taliban from the Zaare district, 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of Mazar-i-Sharif, capital of Balkh province.
"Zaare is very important because it's on the main highway linking the provinces of Balkh, Jozjan and Samangan," said Dostam, who was speaking to Agence France-Presse (AFP) from the frontline in Balkh, near the border with Uzbekistan.
He said that more than 60 Taliban men had been killed in the offensive and a large quantity of arms and ammunition had been seized.
Dostam also claimed that forces loyal to the opposition had captured the Safid pass near Dara-e-Souf in the neighboring Samangan province.
A senior Taliban official confirmed the advance of the opposition, but said the center of Zaare was still divided between the warring sides.
"They have not captured the center. That is now the frontline," said the governor of Balkh, Mullah Noorullah Noori.
"We are preparing a counter-attack to liberate the district," Noori said.
Control of transport links is crucial to the civil war in Afghanistan, where usable roads are few and far between.
Fighting has intensified in northern Afghanistan in recent days, with the opposition seemingly emboldened by the prospect of U.S. military strikes on the Taliban.
The Taliban have repeatedly rejected Washington's demands to hand over Osama bin Laden - the U.S.'s chief suspect in the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington
Bin Laden has repeatedly denied the alleged accusations.
U.S. surveillance planes and attack helicopters are already in position at an air base outside the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, in preparation for an attack, Taliban, sources in Uzbekistan said, AFP reported.
Dostam, a member of Afghanistan's ethnic Uzbek minority, has launched a series of attacks in his traditional heartland since the death, earlier this month, of senior opposition commander Ahmad Shah Masood.
Masood, the 49-year-old commander, had been giving an interview to two Arabs posing as journalists when a bomb went off. It had been concealed in a video camera.
He was not the official leader of the opposition movement against the Taliban, but was widely seen as the real obstacle to their conquest of the remaining enclaves of Afghanistan.
His troops hold the strategic Panjshir valley north of Kabul and the mountainous country even further north.
Masood gained the name "Lion of Panjshir" for his resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and went on to become defense minister after Kabul was recaptured in 1992.
But warring factions within the government brought new conflict to Kabul. The Taliban, a new force backed by Pakistan, swept through the country and took the capital for themselves in 1996.
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