|
Taliban Surrendering in Northern Stronghold
KABUL, Nov 24 (News Agencies) - Taliban fighters guarding the ousted regime's last foothold in northern Afghanistan began to surrender en masse Saturday, amid reports of opposition victories further south in the militia's heartland.
Commanders from the Northern Alliance - a loose coalition of anti-Taliban factions - said that up to 2,000 Taliban fighters had surrendered and that opposition forces would take control of the town on Sunday.
The capitulation came as rival opposition leaders prepared for a conference on setting up a new broad-based government, and as a Pashtun tribal elder announced that a strategic southern town had also fallen.
"Tomorrow morning the handing over process will start. It will last until the afternoon," one Alliance commander, Haji Mohammad Muhaqiq, said.
Muhaqiq said some 700 Afghan Taliban and around 600 foreigners - Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis - had surrendered, joining 600 Afghans who had laid down their arms since the latest offensive on Kunduz began Thursday.
The claimed numbers of Taliban troops surrendering were initially impossible to verify, but an Agence France-Presse (AFP) reporter in Bangi, 25 kilometers (15 miles) east of Kunduz, saw many Taliban fighters arriving in jeeps to turn themselves over.
Despite fears of reprisals, opposition fighters in many cases greeted their former foes warmly, shaking hands and cheering their arrival. Some Taliban said they would swap sides and fight for the Alliance.
"There are no more negotiations with the Taliban," General Mohammad Daoud, the leader of a Tajik opposition faction, said outside Khanabad, a strongpoint guarding the approach to Kunduz.
"But the siege of Kunduz is going to continue to allow civilians to leave the city and all militia fighters who so desire to surrender."
Before the start of Thursday's drive, which was backed by fierce U.S. bombardments, there were said to be between 3,000 and 9,000 Taliban, including up to 2,000 foreign fighters, in Konduz.
There have been reports of rivalry between the three rival Northern Alliance factions around the city; Daoud's Tajiks, another mainly Tajik force under Atta Mohammed and the army of Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum.
But Muhaqiq said local people would secure the city as the Taliban moved out, and that the three rival warlords had agreed on the plan.
At the other end of the country, in the heartland of Taliban support near the southern border with Pakistan, Pashtun tribal forces scored another key victory, opposition commander Hamid Karzai told AFP.
Taliban forces remain in control of their headquarters city of Kandahar and a large patch of territory around it, despite advances by local Pashtun leaders and attacks on pockets of resistance by U.S. and British commandos.
Karzai, a former deputy foreign minister and close ally of exiled former king Mohammed Zahir Shah, said local tribal militia had attacked the Taliban on Friday around Takhtapul, some 45 kilometers (30 miles) southeast of Kandahar.
"People rose up against the Taliban and liberated the area. The Taliban tried to counter attack and re-take the area but they couldn't," Karzai said via satellite phone from southern Afghanistan.
"A district between Spin Boldak and Kandahar has been liberated and presumably the road from Kandahar to Pakistan has been cut off."
A Taliban spokesman denied the report, branding it "baseless" according to the Pakistan-based private news agency Afghan Islamic Press (AIP).
A group of Taliban also agreed to surrender in the village of Maidan Shar, 20 kilometers (12 miles) southwest of Kabul and the scene of fighting the last two days, according to a Northern Alliance commander in the area.
There was no independent confirmation of the opposition claims.
A U.S.-led military coalition has backed anti-Taliban forces in overthrowing the regime in a bid to force it to stop protecting Osama bin Laden, an exiled Saudi dissident blamed for the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities.
U.S. and British special forces are operating inside Afghanistan to hunt down bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, a mainly Arab force which forms the backbone of many Taliban forces.
Up to 2,000 foreigners - mainly Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens - are thought to be in Kunduz, according to opposition estimates, and face an uncertain fate if the Northern Alliance takes the city.
On Saturday, the Gulf State of Qatar, which has supported the U.S.-led campaign, voiced fears for its nationals who are thought to be trapped in the pocket after volunteering to fight for al-Qaeda.
"Qatar has expressed deep concern for the fate of Arabs and other foreigners in Afghanistan, particularly in the town of Kunduz, who risk being massacred for ethnic reasons, in violation of international law and human rights," a foreign ministry spokesman told the QNA state news agency.
Pakistan has also expressed concerns about its nationals, amid fears that further "martyrs" to the Taliban cause could stir unrest abroad.
The groups who have fought the Taliban are far from united and the international community is struggling to broker a power-sharing deal to form a new government and head off renewed civil war.
The opposition is broadly split on geographic and ethnic lines.
The Northern Alliance is a loose coalition of Tajik, Uzbek, Hazar and other minority factions that has long opposed the Taliban and which last week ousted the militia from the capital Kabul. It controls the north apart from Kunduz.
The alliance has installed the U.N.-recognized president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, in the capital, but his support base is mainly from his own Tajik faction and there are question marks over the loyalty of his Uzbek and Hazara allies.
South and east of the capital, pockets of Taliban control are facing tribal militias loyal to Pashtun warlords, some of them working with men like Karzai fighting for a faction under the symbolic leadership of the ageing exiled king.
Both groups are due to meet on Tuesday in the former German capital Bonn for a U.N.-brokered summit amid fears that Rabbani's faction might be reluctant to share power after their victory in Kabul.
Rabbani insisted Saturday in an interview with Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper that he had "no personal ambitions."
"I will accept the decision of the meeting," he said.
The Northern Alliance has fought shy of international interference in the peace process, opposing British and French plans to send a stabilization force to protect humanitarian aid shipments.
Residents told AFP that dozens of armed British or U.S. troops were living secretly at a house in Kabul, and around 100 British commandos were based at Bagram airbase north of the capital.
But a larger British and French deployment is on hold and in the absence of an international security presence, aid agencies have had difficulty transporting enough food and medicines to the drought-wracked country.
|
