KABUL/WASHINGTON, 19 November — The siege of Kunduz by Northern Alliance forces is now total. The city itself is said to be turning into a blood bath as Arab, Pakistani and Chechen warriors loyal to Osama Bin Laden execute — or threaten to execute — the thousands of moderate Taleban soldiers who have dared to talk of surrender. It is not difficult to understand why. The Northern Alliance has said it will execute all non-Afghan Taleban forces if they are captured, as they reportedly have in Mazar-e-Sharif. So the non-Afghans now have little choice but to fight to the death.

Commander Dadullah, former chief of Taleban forces in Mazar-e-Sharif, and commander Fazil, who had headed the militia in northern Takhar province, yesterday presented a proposal for the Taleban to pull their forces peacefully out of Kunduz under the auspices of the United Nations. The anti-Taleban alliance has offered the thousands of Taleban fighters inside — but not their foreign hard-line brothers-in-arms — the possibility of surrender. However, at the same time the United States continued to send wave after wave of warplanes, including giant B-52 bombers, to pound the militia, and fighters of the Northern Alliance battered their front lines with artillery fire.

"We have heard that a group of local Taleban tried to surrender in Kunduz but they were killed by the foreign soldiers," the spokesman said, adding that the death toll was less than 150 as reported in some media.

Acting Interior Minister Younis Qanuni also said some Taleban commanders besieged in Kunduz had contacted the Alliance and offered to surrender unconditionally.

A tribal elder told reporters in the Pakistani town of Peshawar yesterday that several thousand fighters surrounded by the Alliance forces in Kunduz reportedly agreed to surrender to the United Nations.

Maulvi Said Hakeem claimed that the Taleban leader in Kunduz, Mulla Wahid Omar, had entrusted him with the task of getting in touch with the UN to negotiate the hand over of all foreign fighters currently holed up in the province with Afghan Taleban forces.

An Alliance commander, Mahidullah, echoed Hakeem’s statement that the Taleban holed up in Kunduz had offered to surrender.

He said the offer was made during negotiations by radio with the Taleban in Kunduz.

Mahidullah said Haji Omar, brother of a top Taleban commander in Kunduz, relayed the offer.

Under the offer, the Taleban would surrender if the opposition Alliance guaranteed that non-Afghans fighting with the Taleban would not be killed and the surrender would be witnessed by United Nations representatives.

There are an estimated 3,000 non-Afghans fighting with the Taleban in Kunduz, including Arabs and Pakistanis.

But the Northern Alliance says nearly 30,000 Al-Qaeda and Taleban troops, a third of them Arabs, Pakistanis or Chechens, are holed up in the Kunduz area.

There was no immediate word as to whether the opposition Alliance has accepted the offer, but the Alliance was clearly eager to avoid a protracted battle with die-hard Taleban and foreign fighters.

Opposition Alliance officials and civilians fleeing the city had said the foreign fighters were pressing their Afghan Taleban commanders not to surrender, fearing for their lives.

Front-line opposition fighters have said they regard the foreigners fighting for the Taleban as invaders and have vowed to kill them.

Meanwhile, several hundred soldiers of the Alliance took positions early yesterday on the Khanabad front line, an AFP reporter saw. Two tanks were also seen in the area around 6:00 a.m. (0130 GMT).

In the west of Kabul, hundreds of Taleban fighters holding positions on hills have refused to surrender.

About 1,000 Alliance fighters converged in armored personnel carriers on the dusty township of Maidan Shahr some 30 km west of Kabul to attack Taleban positions a few kilometers away.

Repeated efforts to persuade the Taleban, backed by Pakistani and Arab fighters, to surrender have failed since the capital fell to the Alliance on Tuesday.

"We have given them enough chances to surrender, but they haven’t listened so far," Sher Alam, the Alliance’s overall commander in the area told Reuters.

Alam said the Taleban fighters were under pressure from Arabs in their ranks not to surrender.

Some living below the Taleban positions were preparing to flee, fearing fighting was imminent.

In Kandahar, the US bombers again pounded positions yesterday but the beleaguered Taleban stayed defiant dismissing reports they would retreat to fight a guerrilla campaign in the mountains.

Ethnic Pashtun tribes in the south, deeply suspicious of the mainly ethnic Tajik and Uzbek Northern Alliance, said they were pursuing their own efforts to agree a bloodless settlement with the Taleban and warned the Alliance not to march on Kandahar.

According to the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP), the Taleban still control the provinces of Helmand, Zabul, Uruzgan and Kandahar in south and central Afghanistan.

The Alliance said yesterday Bin Laden has been localized in southern Afghanistan while the Taleban claimed the world’s most wanted man is no longer in territory under their control.

The besieged militia confirmed the death in a US bombing raid of Muhammad Atef, Bin Laden’s right hand man. Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taleban ambassador to Pakistan, confirmed that Atef, believed to be Al-Qaeda’s military chief, was killed in the US bombing of Kabul.

He told the AIP news agency that Bin Laden is no longer "in an area under our control." But Northern Alliance Interior Minister Younis Qanuni dismissed Zaeef’s claim, saying Bin Laden was hiding 130 kilometers east of Kandahar.

"The Taleban are trying to cheat the international community so that they will stop the aerial bombardments," Qanuni said.

"According to my information, Bin Laden is still in ... Maruf. He has training camps there and strong underground bunkers."

The conflicting reports came after London’s Sunday Times newspaper quoted intelligence sources as saying US and British special forces had narrowed the search for Bin Laden to 78 square km (30 square miles) of rugged terrain in southern Afghanistan.

British and US commandos have been dropped across the southern approach to the area to prevent his escape to Pakistan, said the newspaper, quoting defense sources.

The Sunday Telegraph reported that Al-Qaeda slaughtered 150 Afghan Taleban troops Friday to prevent them from defecting to the Alliance.

"A commander who was foreign gave the order for 150 local Afghan Taleban to be killed because they wanted to surrender," a civilian who fled Kunduz on Saturday told the paper. "They showed them no mercy."

He said the massacre followed the defection of 1,000 Afghans under Taleban Gen. Mirai Nasery.

Roughly 140 people, mostly civilians, have been killed by US airstrikes on Taleban and suspected terrorist targets in Afghanistan in the past two days, the AIP said yesterday.

The Pakistan-based agency said at least 46 people were killed in bombing raids late Saturday and yesterday morning in and around Kandahar.

Citing reports from a variety of sources, AIP said 42 of those died during an intense aerial bombardment of Maywand district, 70 kilometers west of Kandahar city. "Most of the victims were tribal nomads," it said.

Another 93 people were killed in a series of bombing raids on the eastern provinces of Khost and Nangarhar, AIP reported.

The death toll in Khost was put at 62, with most of the victims reported to be students at a madrassa, which was bombed on Friday night as they were saying their evening prayers.

Twenty-eight people, including 19 members of one family, were killed when US planes bombarded Zani Khel village, 10 kilometers west of Khost city, AIP added.

Another 30 people were reported killed yesterday as US planes launched pre-dawn airstrikes on Nangarhar.

The province’s new administrator Qari Abdul Salam told AIP that the strikes targeted Shamshad town, eight kilometers from the border with Pakistan.

AIP said the jets raided the area before dawn and returned for a second attack when people from the adjoining villages were engaged in rescue operations.

A source in Egypt said a son of Egyptian Omar Abderrahman, jailed for life in the United States for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was captured in Afghanistan by anti-Taleban forces.

The source who is close to the outlawed Jamaa Islamiya group said Ahmed Abderrahman, alias Seif Allah, was captured by Northern Alliance forces last week and that his brother Muhammad was alive, though his fate was unknown.

According to a Los Angeles Times report, Bin Laden cobbled together a makeshift air force to support his terror activities, drawing on Afghanistan’s national airline, clandestine charter flights, and even a surplus US Air Force jet.

Bin Laden shipped men and materiel on Afghanistan’s Ariana Airways after the Taleban took control of the country in 1996, the daily reported, adding that he turned to covert charters last year when international sanctions hobbled the airline last year.

Ariana Airlines became a "key node in Al Qaeda’s infrastructure," a former US National Security Council official told the daily. "The network used Ariana to move everything that was useful — money, personnel and materiel."