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Taliban's Omar Reportedly Agrees to Surrender Kandahar
ISLAMABAD, Dec 6 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Media reports and officials say Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar will hand over the final Taliban bastion of Kandahar to a local tribal chief and may also be trying to negotiate his own surrender.
The Defense Department in Washington and the British prime minister's office both confirmed such talks were under way.
Omar "has decided that Kandahar should be handed over to ... commander Mullah Naqibullah," the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) news agency reported a Taliban spokesman as saying.
"A decision has also been taken to form a commission which would be headed by Mullah Naqibullah who will also act as governor of Kandahar," the spokesman said.
"Mullah Omar has taken the decision in consultation with tribal leaders and his associates and
ulema [Islamic scholars]. The decision will be implemented in one or two days."
"We are aware of conversations going on between Taliban leadership and others in Afghanistan," Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said, but added: "We have nothing we can confirm or report to you."
Kandahar, Omar's home, is the birthplace of the Taliban movement and now its final stronghold. The southern Afghan city has been under relentless U.S. air attack since the start of the military campaign on October 7 in response to the Taliban's alliance with alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.
In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair's spokesman said nearly all senior Taliban leaders close to Mullah Mohammed Omar want to surrender, but could not confirm that Omar was ready to cede Kandahar.
"We know that, for the past 24 hours in particular, virtually every senior person around Mullah Omar knows the game is up and wants to surrender," the spokesman said.
If the AIP report is accurate, he said, "It is probably because he is aware desertions are going on around him and their ammunition is low, and he now knows that he and the Taliban are a spent force."
Kenton Keith, the U.S.-led anti-terror coalition's spokesman in Islamabad, said Omar was believed to be negotiating his surrender to Afghanistan's new premier-in-waiting, Hamid Karzai.
"I can tell you authoritatively that some of Mullah Omar's most senior commanders are negotiating their own surrender," Keith told a news conference. "You should also take seriously reports that Mullah Omar himself is negotiating to save his own skin."
He said he had reports that negotiations "to spare a bloodbath" were under way not only between Omar and Karzai, but also "at a tribal level with Pashtuns, and within a regional context with people in Peshawar and Quetta," Pakistani cities near Afghanistan with strong Afghan exile communities.
Karzai was named by an inter-Afghan conference in Bonn on Wednesday to lead a new, six-month interim administration starting from December 22.
Keith warned that many of those negotiating their surrender have "blood on their hands" and could expect to be brought to justice.
Meanwhile, coordinated U.S. airstrikes and ground attacks by anti-Taliban forces continued to target the Tora Bora mountain stronghold where Washington suspects bin Laden and hundreds of his remaining al-Qaeda allies are holed up.
An Agence France-Presse (AFP) correspondent watched as al-Qaeda mountain positions were pummeled by tank fire and hit by five bombs from a U.S. warplane flying under heavy cloud cover.
AIP reported that the U.S. bombing triggered a huge forest fire in the mountains near bin Laden's suspected hideout, a warren of fortified caves and passageways dug deep into the mountain.
U.S. ground forces are in the area but it is not clear how many they are, or what action they are taking in support of their Afghan allies. Anti-Taliban forces claimed that they have taken the caves in the complex amid fierce resistance from al-Qaeda.
Bin Laden's whereabouts are unknown, but local commanders of anti-Taliban forces said the Saudi exile had been sighted at Tora Bora a few days ago.
Provincial officials said an air strike Monday devastated the al-Qaeda leadership, killing at least 10 officials, including treasurer Ali Mahmud and wounding - and perhaps killing - Ayman al-Zawahri, bin Laden's top deputy.
But a London-based activist, like Zawahri, an Egyptian, denied in an interview published Thursday in the
Asharq al-Awsat newspaper that the al-Qaeda No. 2 was dead.
The developments came amid the first grumblings among anti-Taliban forces over the make-up of the interim administration agreed as part of a landmark deal signed Wednesday in Bonn to map out the immediate future of Afghanistan.
Pir Sayed Ahmed Gailani, the leader of one of the four signatories of the Bonn deal - the so-called Peshawar Group - complained the new interim administration lacked balance.
Karzai, also a Pashtun royalist, was named to head the administration that will run Afghanistan for six months from December 22, but he belongs to the Rome Group of former King Mohammed Zahir Shah, who lives in exile in the Italian capital.
In a further sign of tension among anti-Taliban factions, United Nations special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, the architect of the Bonn agreement, said the Iran-backed Cyprus Group signed the accord Wednesday but said it would not take part in the government.
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