KABUL/WASHINGTON, 18 November — The Taleban yesterday vowed to fight on saying it had thousands of fighters in Kandahar ready to defend the militia’s stronghold and dismissed reports that their chief, Mulla Muhammad Omar, had ordered a withdrawal.

Some Taleban forces were seen trickling out of the city as US warplanes bombed the southern bastion again. But the Taleban insisted they remained in control.

Maulvi Najibullah, a Taleban Foreign Ministry spokesman, told reporters: "It is wrong that we have surrendered or have the intention to do so." Thousands of Taleban fighters are in Kandahar to defend the city, another Taleban spokesman told Al-Jazeera. Muhammad Tayyeb Agha, who was described as a spokesman for Omar, said from Kandahar: "Our forces, numbering thousands, have decided to defend Kandahar, the neighboring provinces, Islamic religion and law." Agha said Omar and the entire militia leadership remained in areas controlled by the Taleban.

The Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) reported on Friday that Omar had ordered a pullout from Kandahar and for it to be handed over to two local commanders.

A "small column" of Taleban vehicles was spotted heading northwest toward Herat, Kandahar resident Babrak Ali told AFP by satellite phone.

His account tallied with one given earlier by Pashtun tribal leader Hamid Karzai, who said there were signs an evacuation had started and there were "skirmishes" in the north of Kandahar province.

According to the Associated Press, several hundred Arab and Pakistani fighters waged a fierce battle yesterday against Northern Alliance soldiers in the rugged hills of Paghman, barely 20 kilometers outside the capital Kabul.

Quoting a Northern Alliance soldier aligned with the Ittehad-e-Islami faction of Abdur Rassool Sayyaf AP said the battle in Paghman was ferocious. Gesturing toward the stark mud brown mountain range in the distance, Khan Aga Jan, the soldier said those who survived the battle were hiding there. More than 200 Arab fighters of Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda movement and their Pakistani allies took part in the battle.

Thousands of Taleban troops, including Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens, holed up in Kunduz exchanged artillery and rocket fire with Northern Alliance units yesterday as a deadline for their surrender expired, the opposition said. Observers fear the final assault on the Taleban fighters may result in a massacre.

The mayor of Kunduz city, which straddles a strategically important road leading north to Tajikistan and south to the capital Kabul, had asked the Northern Alliance to delay any advance while he negotiated with the Taleban. "We have surrounded the Kunduz province but unfortunately we have not captured it yet," said Zubai, a Northern Alliance Foreign Ministry official, speaking by telephone from Taloqanm about 60 km to the east of Kunduz.

Zubai said the two-day deadline expired yesterday, "but no one can guarantee when the (large-scale) fighting will start".

Taleban Ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef, who arrived in Pakistan yesterday from a visit to Kandahar said he did not know the whereabouts of Bin Laden despite reports quoting him as saying the terror suspect had left Afghanistan.

"We do not know where Bin Laden is. He is inside Afghanistan somewhere," Zaeef told reporters at the Chaman border crossing.

Earlier, Al-Jazeera satellite television quoted Zaeef as saying Bin Laden had left Afghanistan for an undisclosed destination.

In Washington, the Pentagon said it had "no information" on whether Bin Laden had left Afghanistan.

In Islamabad, a Foreign Ministry official said yesterday it would not grant political asylum to Osama Bin Laden or Taleban chief Mulla Muhammad Omar.

The official dismissed a question whether Pakistan, the only country that still allows a Taleban embassy, would grant asylum to the two if they sought it under the relevant Geneva convention.

"The Geneva convention could not be applied so simply that everybody can (get asylum)," spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan said.

"Asylum is given to those who you think should be given asylum. The country giving asylum takes a decision under international laws as well as its own laws," he said.

"So far as these persons you have mentioned, we have made it clear they will not be given (asylum)," Khan said of Mulla Omar and Bin Laden.

The Taleban also denied yesterday that US bombing had killed top Al-Qaeda official Muhammad Atef, suspected military planner of the devastating Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

"He has not been killed, he is safe and sound," Maulvi Najibullah told Reuters by telephone.

Meanwhile, the US continued airstrikes on areas still held by the militia. A US B-52 bomber yesterday blitzed Taleban positions in Kunduz city.

The low-flying aircraft dropped several bombs around 9:00 a.m. on the hills around the Taleban-controlled town of Khanabad some 20 kilometers east of Kunduz, an AFP reporter said.

US aircraft have over the past week repeatedly targeted the area where, according to the Northern Alliance, nearly 30,000 Taleban troops are holed up, a third of them said to be Arabs, Pakistanis or Chechens.

US warplanes also attacked the home of a top Taleban commander, the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) reported yesterday amid intensified US strikes against Taleban leadership.

The house of Jalaluddin Haqqani and a madrassa were bombed overnight Friday near the eastern town of Khost, leaving two people dead and many others wounded, the AIP said.

"The American objective was to hit Haqqani. Previously his house in Kabul and Gardez were attacked in which several people were killed," a spokesman for Haqqani was quoted as saying.

Haqqani is a powerful Taleban military chief and minister for tribal and frontier affairs.

American planes also pounded the southern city of Kandahar on Friday night and yesterday morning, killing six civilians and injuring 15 others, AIP said.

The forces of anti-Taleban warlord Ismail Khan have advanced toward Kandahar and halted at the junction of three provinces after taking a town at the entrance to the heart of Taleban territory, a spokesman said yesterday.

Fighters of Ismail Khan reached the town of Daralam on the borders of Farah, Nimroz and Helmand provinces and occupied it, Khan’s spokesman Muhamadullah Afsari told Reuters. According to AIP, Taleban have withdrawn from the Farah province. Immediately after the Taleban withdrawal, the province’s center of the same name was plunged into looting and fighting, AIP said.

A former Afghan Mujahedeen commander opposed to the Taleban was yesterday re-appointed governor for Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province, the AIP reported.

Haji Qadeer’s appointment was announced in Nangarhar’s capital of Jalalabad, following three days of deliberation of a council whose rule the Taleban militia had ended on Sept. 12, 1996.

The Council or Eastern Shura was headed by Haji Qadeer who was running the affairs of Afghanistan’s eastern zone — including the provinces of Nangarhar, Lughman, Kunar and Nooristan — before the Taleban dismissed it.

"We will support a national government that is backed by a Loya Jirga," Qadeer announced to a crowd of about 60 senior elders gathered in the hall.

Leaders of the opposition Northern Alliance, with which Qadeer is affiliated, have said they are keen to hold a Loya Jirga, or grand assembly, of tribal elders and Afghan notables to decide on a broad-based government acceptable to all of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups and power centers

Hazrat Ali and Haji Muhammad Zaman — former Mujahedeen commanders like Qadeer — were also contenders for power of the province, according to AIP.

But Ali was appointed deputy governor and in charge of Nangarhar’s police department. Haji Zaman was made chief commander of the Army Corps.

A Japanese free lance journalist detained by the Taleban regime in Afghanistan has been freed, Japanese news reports said yesterday. Daigen Yanagida, 37, was flown to Pakistan later.