WASHINGTON/KABUL, 29 November - What everybody feared would happen has now happened. The Pakistanis, Chechens and Arabs who surrendered at the weekend to Alliance forces in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz have been killed, to the last man. They died inside Qala-e-Jangi fortress west of the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, where they had allegedly staged an uprising that lasted three days.
"We have subdued the last of those who were resisting this morning," said Gen. Abdul Atif, one of the commanders who led the assault. "In total, we killed 450. None wanted to surrender."
The truth of that last statement is being questioned by none other than Amnesty International, which has already demanded a full and independent inquiry.
The fort looked every bit the battlefield when journalists were allowed in to view the full extent of the carnage. It was littered with the skeletal remains of jeeps and trucks bombed by US warplanes. Fragments of bombs, shells and rockets were everywhere - as were the scattered bits of Arab-Afghans, some with their heads blown off, others missing limbs.
In Washington, the CIA said one of its operatives was also killed in the fighting, while five wounded US soldiers have arrived in Germany for treatment.
In Islamabad, spokesman for the US-led coalition against terrorism, American Kenton Keith, told reporters there had been a "pitched battle" at the fort and that some Red Cross workers "just got out with their lives".
Keith, answering growing disquiet over the killings, said that as soon as the prisoners on Sunday had captured a cache of weapons from lax alliance soldiers and had begun firing, "they became combatants, they took offensive action". "They gave no quarter," Keith added, denying those inside had been executed en masse.
"This was not a massacre, it was a pitched battle. To try to make it appear as a massacre does not accord with the facts."
Down south, Mullah Muhammad Omar, defiant after a US raid failed to hit him, ordered the Taleban to stand firm. Pinned down by American bombing, in the sights of US Marines and under assault from Afghan tribal foes, the Taleban are trapped in their stronghold of Kandahar but their supreme leader said there should be no surrender.
In a related development, FBI officials have realized that they missed vital information about Al-Qaeda and its leader 12 years ago after the analysis of photos taken by a secret camera of the FBI in 1989. The picture showed six extremists receiving arms training from an officer of the American special forces, Muhammad Ali Abu Al-Saud. The officer, an American of Egyptian origin, was an Al-Qaeda member and a suspect in the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
The FBI believes that the Al-Qaeda planned to attack the two New York towers as early as the beginning of the 1990s because a picture of the towers were found in the room of Syed Naseer, the man who assassinated an ultra right rabbi in 1990, 11 years before the blast occurred. The FBI has also discovered that Naseer had strong links with Muhammad Ali Abu Al-Saud, a double agent.
Also yesterday, British troops searching for suspected members of Al-Qaeda crossed over the border and searched a village in southwestern Pakistan. Around 20 troops in six armored personnel carriers carried out the search for suspects Tuesday afternoon in the village of Killi Siddiq in Chaghai district, three kilometers into Pakistan, a Balochistan government official said.
In talks on the future of a broad-based government in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance left open the possibility of a multinational force for the country and said it was ready to accept a role for the former king, addressing two key stumbling blocks to a post-Taleban political deal.
But on the second day of landmark inter-Afghan talks in Germany, the United Nations cautioned a full agreement may not be reached on the security issue and the makeup of a power-sharing interim authority for the country.
"At the moment there is no need (for a multinational force)... although it can in principle be part of a comprehensive peace package," said the head of the Alliance delegation, Yunus Qanuni.
Ahmad Wali Masood, the brother of slain resistance commander Ahmad Shah Masood, confirmed to AFP that the issue was now "under examination" and a final decision would be deferred to the interim council the groups hope to appoint.
Diplomatic sources attributed the Alliance's shift to overwhelming international pressure backing the UN's security proposals, a critical condition to donor aid and the flow of badly needed humanitarian assistance.
Meanwhile, a few hundred electors gathered at Herat's main mosque yesterday to elect a new mayor less than a month after the Northern Alliance seized this western city from Taleban forces.
The elections, the first since former King Mohammad Zaher Shah was overthrown in 1973, are a sign that life is returning to a semblance of normalcy in Herat even as Afghan leaders meet in Germany to work out more complicated questions of how to run the country. "Today, we are witnessing the most significant occasion - the election of the mayor of Herat," said Abdul-Zaher Ershad, head of Herat's radio and television. "The people of this ancient city are witnessing the first result of freedom and democracy."
Eight candidates are running in the elections, which had been postponed to allow the candidates to campaign on local television. Ismail Khan, a senior northern alliance leader who is running Herat now, has been promising the elections since last week.
