KABUL/WASHINGTON, 20 November — The war in Afghanistan is becoming increasingly fragmented and chaotic. In the north, troops from the Northern Alliance besieging the Taleban redoubt of Kunduz have halted their assault and tried to persuade the thousands of desperate defenders to give themselves up. Special forces from the United States combed southern Afghanistan in an attempt to close in on its most wanted man, Osama Bin Laden. The United Nations scrambled to get Afghan leaders to hold talks on their war-ravaged country’s future. And in Farah, the beleaguered Taleban militia surrendered power to a 100-member council of local tribal elders after negotiations and then left the area after refusing to surrender their arms. The new council immediately warned another tribal leader Ismail Khan, who has seized power in the adjoining province of Herat, against venturing into Farah.

Four journalists who were covering the war in Afghanistan — including Reuters television cameraman Harry Burton, an Australian, and Azizullah Haidari, an Afghan-born photographer — reportedly became victims of the brutality they were determined to reveal to the world when they themselves were abducted by bandits on the road to Kabul. The other two journalists were Julio Fuentes of Spain’s El Mundo and Maria Grazia Cutuli of Italy’s Corriere della Sera. Their fate is still unclear, with some reports saying they have been abducted and others that they were executed in cold blood by bandits.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia yesterday emphasized the importance of establishing a government representing all parties in Afghanistan. “Saudi Arabia views that a political solution is more important than anything else,” Information Minister Dr. Fouad Al-Farsy told the Saudi Press Agency after the Cabinet meeting. The Cabinet urged the United Nations to make sure that humanitarian assistance reaches the Afghans in the cities and villages to avoid aggravating the acute refugee problem.

In Washington, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected any negotiations for the departure of Taleban leader Mulla Muhammad Omar from the besieged southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

He said the US was “not inclined” to negotiate surrenders, in reference to efforts on the ground to negotiate the departure of the Taleban from their last remaining strongholds in Afghanistan — Kandahar in the south and Kunduz in the north.

“The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders, nor are we in a position, with relatively small numbers of forces on the ground, to accept prisoners,” the defense secretary said.

As if to reinforce this point, US bombers struck at Kandahar in the south and around Kunduz in the north in a drive to track down Bin Laden and defeat his long-time protectors, the Taleban.

“According to my information there is no military activity in the city of Kunduz. The city is surrounded by the forces of the Northern Alliance, and US planes continue to regularly strike Taleban positions on the outskirts of the city,” said Abdul Vadut Kudusi, Northern Alliance military attaché in Dushanbe.

The opposition said Afghan Taleban troops in the surrounded enclave have been offering to surrender but Pakistani, Arab and Chechen fighters linked to the Al-Qaeda were refusing to give up.

More than 1,000 people were killed by US airstrikes around the Taleban-held city of Kunduz over the weekend, a Pakistani newspaper reported yesterday, quoting a militia commander. The commander, Mulla Fazil, told the daily Dawn by satellite phone that heavy pounding from the air had killed some 800 people in the Kunduz area in northern Afghanistan and 250 in nearby Khanabad district. Fazil gave the air attacks as the chief reason for a decision by the Taleban to surrender Kunduz if the handover to the victorious Northern Alliance forces could be conducted under UN supervision.

Speaking from the nearby city of Taloqan, an Alliance spokesman said about 200 of the several thousand Taleban inside the encircled city surrendered on Sunday. They may have been the lucky ones.

The spokesman said Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens associated with Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network turned their guns on other frightened Afghan comrades on Sunday, killing 53 of them.

Many of the foreign fighters have chosen to fight to the death rather than surrender, knowing they face revenge at the hands of Afghans who hate them, and because they have no safe haven to which to flee. None of the Alliance reports could be independently verified.

According to Pakistan-based Online news agency Mulla Akhtar Usmani, corps commander of five southern Afghan provinces, has been named successor to Taleban supreme commander Mulla Muhammad Omar in case of the latter’s death. Usmani is considered a close companion of Omar.

Ariyonfard Shamsulkhak, press attaché at the Alliance embassy in Dushanbe said the Taleban had 10,000 to 12,000 fighters in the enclave, including Al-Qaeda forces.

“If the Taleban do not lay down their weapons, then the fighting will begin. There is no other way out. And then, unfortunately, another city will be sacked,” he said. Alliance’s acting Interior Minister Younis Qanuni said Taleban troops who surrender in Kunduz would be transferred to Kandahar, the militia’s southern base.

“Instead of ethnic cleansing we want ethnic trust,” he said. For foreign soldiers fighting with the Taleban “a court will decide their fate.” In Kandahar, militia commanders were negotiating with tribal leaders for a peaceful handover of power.

More US military special forces troops have been put into southern Afghanistan to hunt Bin Laden, leaders of the Taleban and members of Al-Qaeda network, the Pentagon said yesterday.

The governor of the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad confirmed yesterday that four

journalists had been abducted by bandits on the road to Kabul, but could not confirm reports they had been killed.

“We believe that the journalists were abducted by a group of 60-70 bandits,” governor Haji Abdul Qadeer told the AIP.

“So far there is no proof that these people have been killed,” he added.

Witnesses, however, said they had seen four bodies lying at the site of the ambush along the Jalalabad-Kabul highway and media groups reported that four journalists were missing.

A group of French journalists working for Radio France International was robbed Sunday by bandits with Kalashnikov rifles while heading for Kabul on the same road from Pakistan.

In Washington, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said yesterday the United States and Pakistan were working closely together to prevent Bin Laden from escaping Afghanistan.

“The United States has been working very closely with Pakistan,” said Fleischer.

“Pakistan has a very long border with Afghanistan and it’s not always easy to monitor everything that goes back and forth but we are pleased with our cooperation with Pakistan.”

He said the United States had no reason to believe Bin Laden had escaped Afghanistan while numerous other top administration officials have said that US forces were closing in on their prey.

London’s Sunday Times newspaper said US and British forces had narrowed the search for Bin Laden to 78 square kilometers of rugged terrain in southern Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, under international pressure for a swift establishment of an interim broad-based government, the Alliance said it agreed in principle with the UN-sponsored plan to build a multiethnic administration but held reservations about the fine print.

US envoy to Afghanistan James Dobbins said yesterday after meetings at an airport near Kabul that a conference of Afghan leaders to decide on an interim government could convene by the end of this week, probably in Germany.

In an upbeat assessment, James Dobbins said Kabul appeared to be safe and he was hopeful that the US Embassy — closed since the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 — could reopen within a couple of weeks.

As Pakistan warned the Alliance not to install its own regime, the UN envoy to Afghanistan, Francesc Vendrell, pushed ahead with efforts to broker a meeting of all Afghan factions in neutral territory.

He met separately with leaders of the dominant Pashtun community and ousted Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani from the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance. Dobbins also held talks with Rabbani in Kabul. A US Embassy spokesman in Pakistan told AFP that Dobbins was supporting United Nations efforts to promote a representative government in Afghanistan following the collapse of the Taleban regime.

Interior Minister Qanuni, said after the Vendrell meeting there was agreement “in principle” for an interim government.

“But on the details we have some observations and we are going to inform Vendrell about that today,” he told AFP.

In Iran, the head of the moderate National Islamic Front of Afghanistan (NIFA), Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani, yesterday called for the swift creation of an interim government in Afghanistan in order to avoid conflict.

In an interview with Iran’s state IRNA news agency, the exiled Afghan elder called for the “formation of an early consensus interim government in Afghanistan.”

“An interim government, with the backing of all Afghans, should be put in place at the earliest to rid the country of internal fighting and other disturbances,” Gailani said.

The Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) reported heavy weekend bombing in Kandahar and elsewhere.

The brother of a leading opposition commander said Taleban supreme leader Omar had abandoned plans to give the city up after Omar had a dream that envisaged Omar remaining in charge for as long as he lived.

In US airstrikes on Shamshad town early yesterday in the east Afghan province of Nangarhar at least seven people were killed and several suffered injuries.

In another development, Britain has delayed the deployment of troops after the Northern Alliance said they they would not welcome the British soldiers who were expected to fly to Afghanistan yesterday, media reports said.

“The operational order was written, the movement plan had been worked out — but it is all on hold now. It is probably better that it happened now than three weeks down the line when somebody turns on our boys,” the Telegraph newspaper quoted a defense source as saying.

Britain has sent a senior envoy to Kabul to set up a diplomatic mission and start talks with the Northern Alliance and local leaders, Downing Street said.

A contingent of French soldiers, assigned to secure an airfield outside the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, have been forced to wait in neighboring Uzbekistan while negotiations continued with the Alliance on where they would be deployed.

In parts of Afghanistan, it was starting to look like old times. Residents long starved of entertainment fought their way in to see the first public screening in Kabul of a film in the five years since the now defeated Taleban took the city.