KABUL/WASHINGTON/ LONDON, 15 November — There is now little doubt that this is the beginning of the end for the Taleban regime in Afghanistan. The liberation of the capital by Northern Alliance forces two days ago, and the Taleban’s flight from the city, resulted yesterday in an apparent free-for-all, with Afghans from the mainly ethnic Pashtun regions in the south and east rising up against the Taleban and local warlords and Northern Alliance forces made up of minority Uzbek, Hazara and Tajik troops seizing more land.
Rumors circulated that the Taleban regime had even abandoned its stronghold of Kandahar, and US commandos were being deployed to block Osama Bin Laden’s possible escape routes. Mulla Omar, spiritual leader of the Taleban, was reported to have fled to Pakistan — a claim strongly denied by what is left of the Taleban authorities.
In Kandahar, local commanders switched sides and threw their lot in with opposition forces, Said Ibragim Khikmat, the Afghan government-in-exile’s envoy in Dushanbe said.
“The people staged an uprising. Northern Alliance forces have taken control, there are no Taleban left in Kandahar,” he said, adding however that Northern Alliance troops had not yet entered the city. A Taleban spokesman, reportedly speaking live from the city to the Al-Jazeera television news network, denied Khikmat’s claim, which came one day after a lightning opposition offensive took Kabul.
“This is not true... We are still here and the situation is stable,” said Mohammad Tayyeb Agha, whom Al-Jazeera identified as Mulla Omar’s spokesman.
“Kandahar and surrounding areas are not in danger” of falling to the opposition, the Taleban spokesman insisted.
Agha also said that Bin Laden and Mulla Omar were “inside Afghanistan” and “in good health, thank God.”
He denounced the “hostile” statements by the foreign minister of the Northern Alliance, Abdullah Abdullah, that Bin Laden and Omar will be put on trial if they are captured.
The Russian news agency Ria-Novosti said on Tuesday that Omar had fled Kandahar to Pakistan. But the Afghan opposition said news of Omar’s flight were just “rumors.”
Agha said the Taleban were “confident that problems will soon be resolved” and US President George W. “Bush and (his allies) will be tried by an Islamic court” in Afghanistan.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confirmed there was fighting in the Kandahar area, but the city’s fate was impossible to independently confirm. “There is fighting in and around Kandahar,” Rumsfeld said while touring the ruins of New York’s World Trade Center, which was destroyed on Sept. 11 in a suicide attack by hijacked airliners which Washington says was ordered by Bin Laden, the head of the Al-Qaeda network.
US forces supported the Northern Alliance offensive with air strikes, supply drops and military advisers in order to break Taleban control, but their key mission in Afghanistan is to hunt down Bin Laden and his lieutenants.
US special forces commandos have been flown into southern Afghanistan, where Taleban control has imploded, to block roads and carry out “a series of assessments”, Rumsfeld said. “We have been inserting some teams in the south,” he said. “They have been interdicting the main roads that connect the north to the south... to stop people who ought to be stopped.”
Despite abandoning the defense of key cities, Taleban leaders have vowed to fight on against US and opposition forces in a guerrilla war, and Rumsfeld admitted that the coalition had a hard task ahead.
He said that as Taleban leaders lost their grip, Al-Qaeda’s experienced and mainly Arab guerrillas had taken an organizing role in the remaining forces.
Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair said the Taleban was in a state of “total collapse”. British special forces are also involved in the hunt, but defense sources in London said they had no clear idea where Bin Laden might be hiding and that his Taleban protectors appeared to be taking to the hills for a guerrilla campaign.
The Taleban are in “total collapse”, Blair told parliament in London yesterday. Blair confirmed several thousand British troops were on standby to stabilize the major urban centers overrun by the Northern Alliance and laid a document before parliament detailing the evidence against Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network in connection with the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States.
“It is now clear that the Taleban have been decisively defeated across Afghanistan... Kabul fell without serious resistance on Monday night. Key cities in the Pashtun south have followed Kabul swiftly in falling, including Jalalabad. It is clear that support for the Taleban is evaporating. “Though there may be some pockets of resistance, the idea that this has been some kind of tactical retreat is just the latest Taleban lie. They are in total collapse,” Blair said. The government published its latest dossier on evidence against Bin Laden, immediately acknowledging it did not constitute a watertight legal case.
Additional information now suggested a majority of those involved in the Sept. 11 attacks were Al-Qaeda operatives, the document says. It cites the oft-repeated comments by Bin Laden and his associates over the Al-Jazeera satellite television network and this past weekend in the Dawn newspaper in Pakistan.
“The intelligence material now leaves no doubt whatever of the guilt of Bin Laden and his associates,” the government document says. British authorities are taking seriously the threat of further attacks, noting that Al-Qaeda has sought to acquire nuclear and chemical weapons.
Meanwhile, a 30-year-old British man was arrested in London yesterday in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, following a request by the FBI, police said. The man was being interviewed at a central London police station. The arrest was under a section of legislation relating to the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.
In northern Afghanistan opposition troops exchange mortar fire with a besieged Taleban garrison in Kunduz, the crippled regime’s last bastion north of the Hindu Kush, ahead on an expected assault on the town.
Former President Burhanuddin Rabbani was expected back in Kabul, but senior officials in his government-in-waiting insisted he would abide by an agreement to set up a power-sharing administration with other faction leaders. “We are backing an interim government in Kabul, after the collapse of the Taleban,” said senior Alliance official Yunis Qanuni in Kabul. “We want this interim government to be a broad-based government that all ethnic parties in Afghanistan are involved in. And after two years, the general elections will be held in our country.”
The Northern Alliance’s decision to grab Kabul despite being urged not to by the United States and others has annoyed the king’s camp, and at least one Pashtun leader that has seized territory following the Taleban collapse has warned the Alliance to stay off his land.
Pashtun warlord Yunis Khalis took control of Nargarhar province, including the key city of Jalalabad, yesterday after the Taleban fled the area. Pakistani officials said his men had closed the key Torkham border crossing.
“Neither the Northern Alliance nor anybody else should try to enter into Nangarhar,” a spokesman for Khalis told the Afghan Islamic Press.
With tensions still running high, Taleban and Al-Qaeda fighters still at large and amid reports that aid convoys have been hijacked and Taleban prisoners slaughtered, a UN-endorsed peacekeeping force has been proposed.
In another development, Britain’s Defense Ministry announced that “several thousand” paratroopers and Marine commandos had been put on 48-hour standby to head for Afghanistan. They could be deployed in the capital Kabul and the strategic northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif to pave the way for a wider force and could also help with essential humanitarian relief work, a spokesman said. But later, in the British parliament, Blair said: “We cannot, of course, rule out some of our troops being used in offensive frontline operations.” A Taleban spokesman said in Islamabad that 20 foreigners, including Americans and Britons, were among 50 people killed in a militia attack on a Northern Alliance convoy in northern Afghanistan, the AIP reported yesterday.
The Pakistan-based agency quoted Taleban spokesman Mullah Abdullah as saying the deaths came Tuesday when the militia attacked a Northern Alliance convoy at Bangi, on the road between the cities of Taloqan and Kunduz. The report could not be independently verified. The Pentagon yesterday said it had no information to support a Taleban claim that 20 foreigners, including Americans and Britons, were killed in an attack on an opposition convoy in northern Afghanistan.
“We have no reports of US casualties, of such an attack,” Pentagon spokesman David Lapan said. The Pentagon will investigate, Lapan said, noting that the Talieban has made a number of false claims of casualties that have been refuted upon further examination. The Pentagon added that it would be dangerous to assume that the Taleban had collapsed despite sweeping losses to opposition forces in Afghanistan.
