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Taliban Surrender Kandahar, Pentagon Says Fighting Continues
KABUL, Dec 7 (News Agencies) - Despite reports that the Taliban surrendered their last bastion, Kandahar, on Friday, the Pentagon said that fighting continued to flare around and near the southern city and the situation remained unclear, news agencies reported.
"The Taliban have completely surrendered in Kandahar and they have laid down their arms," Hajid Bashir Ahmed, a local Pashtun tribal leader and commander, told the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press news agency. "There has been no resistance and Kandahar city is completely peaceful" after being handed over to a
shura, or tribal council.
But the Pentagon's chief spokesperson, Victoria Clarke, said, "We're getting a lot of pieces of information of varying value, and we just don't have enough to characterize the situation."
She said there was fighting "around and near Kandahar" but would not provide details or say whether it involved Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters fleeing from the city, according to a report by Agence France-Presse (AFP).
"Especially in that area you have a lot of things going on. You have a lot of different moving pieces and factions and people - a lot of different things at the same time," she said.
Clarke told reporters that she knew of only one engagement involving U.S. ground troops - a clash in which U.S. Marines destroyed a convoy of Taliban and al-Qaeda vehicles south of Kandahar, killing seven people, after they tried to run a roadblock.
There had also been reports of looting and unrest in the city as the Taliban fled, but a resident told AFP by telephone that anti-Taliban forces had entered the former Taliban stronghold in an orderly manner.
Forces of Mullah Naqibullah, a former military chief of Kandahar to whom the Taliban were to surrender under a deal brokered by the new Afghan interim leader, Hamid Karzai, entered the city Friday morning, he said.
"They disarmed the Taliban and installed themselves in the army corps headquarters in Kandahar. Naqibullah's men did not have uniforms, they were dressed in ordinary clothes," he added.
Some Taliban could still be seen in the early afternoon but a few hours later they had disappeared from Kandahar's streets, where all shops were closed. Residents were staying indoors, frightened to go outside.
During the afternoon, troops of another local anti-Taliban leader, former Kandahar governor Gul Agha, also entered the city and made their way to the governor's building, the Kandahar resident said.
Recognizable by their military fatigues, Agha's men were carrying black, green and red flags - Afghanistan's flag of independence that was replaced during the communist period in the 1980s.
The former governor has been enraged by the terms of the surrender deal, under which power is to be transferred initially to Naqibullah and the tribal council. Agha's forces seized Kandahar's airport on Thursday night.
Karzai's men were also in the city, wearing clothes typical of the province of Uruzgan, where the royalist anti-Taliban leader is based.
Kandahar radio went back on air and played only music, which had been banned under the Taliban's strict interpretation of Islamic law. There were no news reports or announcements.
In the distance, sporadic gunfire could be heard, but there did not appear to be any combat in the city.
An earlier report by AFP said that the whereabouts of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar were unknown. Karzai said Mullah Omar, who had his headquarters in Kandahar, was missing but he would be arrested and brought to justice.
A U.S. coalition spokesman in Islamabad said anti-Taliban forces were close to catching Omar following the surrender of Kandahar, which came two months to the day after the United States launched air strikes on Afghanistan.
Spokesman Kenton Keith said Omar was believed to be in Kandahar despite reports from the new tribal council that he had disappeared.
"The opposition forces are closing in on him and we expect at some point, within a reasonable period, he will be in the hands of the opposition and we hope to cooperate in bringing him to justice," Keith told reporters.
Pentagon spokesperson Clarke said U.S. forces have reports about the "general whereabouts" of Mullah Omar, but would not say whether he was believed to have fled the city.
"We have some pretty good confidence that if Omar, UBL [Osama bin Laden], or any of the senior leadership comes under the control [of opposition forces], they will be handled in a way we will be happy with," she said.
Karzai said a general amnesty had been extended to "common Taliban," allowing them to return to their homes, but Omar would have to face the consequences of his failure to renounce terrorism.
"If there is evidence against him, he must face justice," he told AFP. "I've been asking him for the past month to renounce terrorism and condemn the brutalities that terrorism committed in Afghanistan, the United States and the rest of the world. He did not do that. Last night was his last chance before the transfer of power to do that."
The United States has made it clear it would not accept any deal that enabled Omar or other senior Taliban leaders to walk free.
Omar is regarded as the principal protector of bin Laden, believed by Afghan opposition commanders to be on the run in the mountainous Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday the fall of Kandahar would narrow the focus of the U.S. campaign to the fortified caves in eastern Afghanistan where local tribal forces backed by U.S. warplanes are hunting for bin Laden.
Opposition commander Haji Mohammad Zaman, who is leading the search for bin Laden, said Friday that the Saudi dissident accused by the U.S. of masterminding the deadly September 11 attacks on New York and outside Washington was in the Tora Bora area.
"He is here," Zaman told an AFP reporter on the front lines around Melawa mountain, south of the eastern Afghanistan city of Jalalabad.
Al-Qaeda fighters were putting up fierce resistance in the area on Friday, blasting anti-Taliban positions with mortars from their mountain hideouts.
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