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Taliban Forced Back Into Kandahar After Provinces Fall
KABUL, Nov 15 (News Agencies) - Taliban fighters retreated toward their spiritual headquarters Thursday as local warlords grabbed more territory from the routed hardline militia.
With the Northern Alliance strengthening its position in Kabul, the Taliban faced key battles in Kandahar, the bastion of supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, and in Kunduz, where the militia is defending its last stronghold in the north.
The alliance meanwhile promised elections would be held in two years and the international community stepped up calls for efforts to set up a broad-based government.
But less than a week after the alliance took the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif sparking a succession of Taliban withdrawals across the country, attention was focused on Kandahar to see if the Taliban would make a last stand.
Its retreat from eastern and central Afghanistan on Wednesday left several key provinces in the hands of local
mujahedin commanders and Kandahar further exposed.
U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said fighting was raging in and around Kandahar and that he expected the city to fall.
Rumsfeld said U.S. special forces were blockading main roads leading into southern Afghanistan to try to catch fleeing Taliban and supporters of accused terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.
The Northern Alliance ambassador to neighboring Tajikistan said the Taliban had been beaten in Kandahar after "the people staged an uprising" but militia spokesmen insisted the Taliban were still in control.
A Taliban spokesman told the Arab news channel Al-Jazeera that Kandahar, was "stable" and there was no danger of it falling.
Thousands of Northern Alliance soldiers were also preparing for an assault on the northern city of Kunduz. The Taliban is thought to have a large number of its Pakistani and Arab fighters among the force defending the surrounded city.
In a defiant message broadcast over the Taliban's radio network late Tuesday, Omar - believed holed up in Kandahar - ordered his troops to stand and fight.
But senior alliance officials and media reports said the provinces of Khost, Kunar, Logar, Nangarhar, Paktia, Paktika and Uruzgan provinces were controlled by "local elders" after Taliban leaders fled Wednesday.
Radio Afghanistan, the national station now under alliance control, also said there was a popular revolt against the Taliban in Ghazni, another key central province.
But the loyalty of the new rulers to the alliance was questionable.
After taking control of Nangarhar and its strategic capital Jalalabad - with the help of heavy U.S. bombing, Younis Khalis, head of a faction of the Hizb-e-Islami
mujahedin, warned off challengers to his authority.
A spokesman for Khalis told Afghan Islamic Press (AIP): "Neither the Northern Alliance nor anybody else should try to enter into Nangarhar."
Neighboring Logar went to the army of exiled warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a bitter rival of Khalis, while Khost was in the hands of tribal leaders and
jihadi commanders, AIP said.
The mainly ethnic Pashtun Taliban emerged as a force from nowhere in late 1994 promising to end years of factional fighting between different warlords.
But the opposition has made a spectacular return over the past week, given extra force by U.S. bombing raids as part of the U.S.-led anti-terrorism war launched after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington.
Kabul emerged from a day of celebrations over the Taliban's fall with more signs of the population casting aside vestiges of the militia's five-year experiment in imposing their form of Islamic rule.
Barbershops did a roaring trade shaving off beards that were imposed on men. Some women dared not to wear the heavy
burqa head-to-foot veil, a gesture for which they could have been publicly flogged under the Taliban.
With international concerns growing over how the new Afghanistan is governed, the Northern Alliance took control of the interim administration.
The Alliance - a disparate grouping of ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and other minorities - has invited all Afghan groups to start negotiations on Afghanistan's future.
But it said its president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, would take the helm of an interim administration while it took part in attempts to form a broad-based government and hold elections in two years.
Rabbani, the president who was ousted by the Taliban in 1996, would head a transitional government in a move likely to anger exiled opposition groups loyal to former king Mohammed Zahir Shah.
The alliance said it had set up a supreme military and security council to oversee the gathering of an interim body to determine the makeup of a future Afghanistan government.
The council, led by the alliance's defense minister General Mohammad Qasim Fahim, has three months to arrange the convening of a supreme council of national unity, the alliance said in a statement read on Radio Afghanistan.
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