KABUL/WASHINGTON, 17 November — The final hours of the Taleban’s existence as a governing force in Afghanistan were played out yesterday when their spiritual leader Mulla Muhammad Omar ordered the militia to withdraw from its Kandahar headquarters and retreat into the Afghan mountains, paving the way for the fall of the Taleban stronghold. One person who will not be joining his Taleban comrades is Osama Bin Laden’s top deputy, Muhammad Atef, who was killed in a US airstrike south of Kabul.
Omar had taken the decision to retreat from Kandahar because of the heavy civilian casualties in the bombing raids, the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) claimed. The Taleban forces were later reported to have begun leaving Kandahar. Omar also reportedly abandoned Kandahar. However, ethnic Pashtun tribes and commanders in Kandahar province were also reported to have risen up against the Taleban.
AIP added that Kandahar would be handed over to local commanders Mulla Naqeebullah and Haji Bashar. Both were leading fighters in the Afghan resistance war against the Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989.
Naqeebullah belonged to deposed President Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamiat-i-Islami party and was head of an army corps in Kandahar in 1994 when the Taleban seized the city, AIP said. He is an influential leader of the Alakozai tribe.
Haji Bashar belonged to the Hezb-e-Islami group of another faction leader, Younis Khalis, during the anti-Soviet war. Bashar is a top member of the Noorzai tribe which is also influential in Kandahar.
Muhammad Atef, the Egyptian-born commander of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network killed in a US raid, was considered Bin Laden’s second-in-command and his possible successor in the Al-Qaeda leadership, according to the FBI’s list of "Most Wanted Terrorists".
He was indicted in the United States for involvement in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and many US officials said they believe he might have masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
Atef was also accused of involvement in the 1993 attacks on US soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia, in which 18 US Rangers were killed.
A former Egyptian policeman, Atef met Bin Laden in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s, when both men joined Mujahedeen fighting the Soviets. Their band of "Afghan Arabs" formed the nucleus that later became Al-Qaeda. Atef had served as Al-Qaeda’s military commander since 1996 and also acted as a media adviser for Bin Laden.
Since the fall of Kabul on Tuesday, analysts have speculated that the Taleban would be forced to embark on a guerrilla war in the rugged and often impenetrable Afghan mountains. Former Deputy Foreign Minister Hamid Karzai, who has been in southern Afghanistan for the past month trying to organize a Pashtun tribal rebellion, had been trying to negotiate a Taleban surrender in Kandahar.
US bombs reportedly rained on Kandahar again yesterday. AIP said the Taleban Foreign Ministry and a mosque were destroyed and 11 civilians killed.
Earlier, an Afghan opposition general had given a blunt ‘surrender or die’ ultimatum to thousands of militia surrounded in the northern city of Kunduz. According to Gen. Muhammad Daud, Northern Alliance forces held talks yesterday to persuade thousands of Taleban dug into their last northern bastion of Kunduz to surrender.
The governor of Kunduz had called for a two-day grace period before the Northern Alliance attack the city in order to evacuate citizens, according to Daud.
Opposition warlord Ismail Khan vowed earlier yesterday to march on Kandahar — and occupy it if necessary — despite opposition from local tribes to an outside force taking the city.
Khan, a veteran Mujahedeen commander, this week retook his old power base, the western city of Herat that commands a major road through the Desert of Death to Kandahar. Khan is an old enemy of the Taleban — they drove him out of Herat in 1995 and jailed him in 1997, but he escaped last year. "We all belong to Afghanistan," the gray-bearded Khan told a news conference in the garden of a secluded Herat villa. "So we shouldn’t consider occupying Kandahar as an invasion."
Although Khan is a respected figure, he is a Persian-speaker and this inspires distrust among the ethnic Pashtuns who dominate the south and make up most of the Taleban. Many anti-Taleban Pashtun leaders say they do not want non-Pashtun forces moving into the city.
Asked whether he would press on with his offensive, Khan said: "Absolutely. If the terrorists do not leave Kandahar then we’ll go there to liberate it."
He said that now opposition forces had taken Kabul, he was opposed to the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday US special forces on the ground in Afghanistan were engaged in combat and were killing Taleban troops.
"We are closely connected to forces who are attacking or retreating and they are participating," in fighting, said Rumsfeld on a visit to a military base in Waukegan, Illinois, without specifying where the combat was taking place.
In other developments:
o A safehouse of the Al-Qaeda network that was captured by anti-Taleban forces in Kabul showed that Osama Bin Laden may have been trying to produce a biological weapons. The Times newspaper of London said among those found in the safehouse was a formula on a biological chemical called ricin, an untraceable poison that is twice as deadly as cobra venom.
o France yesterday sent its first contingent of soldiers to northern Afghanistan as part of an international effort to help secure the area for the delivery of humanitarian aid. The French Defense Ministry said a total of 58 French soldiers were due to arrive in the northeastern Afghanistan city of Mazar-e-Sharif over the weekend after flying first to Turkey and Uzbekistan.
o Several hundred Hazara militia from Afghanistan’s central highlands had gathered outside Kabul in a bid to defend their fellow Shiite Muslims against persecution by the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance. The Hazaras, who come from the central Bamiyan province and claim to be descendants of Genghis Khan and the Mongols of legend, are demanding equal rights with the majority Sunni Muslims under Afghanistan’s post-Taleban regime.
o In Chaman, a city in Pakistan close to Afghanistan border, armed followers of tribal leader Hamid Karzai and former Kandahar governor Gul Agha have established positions in southern Pakistan to take on the Taleban, witnesses arriving in Pakistan said yesterday. Karzai has been in central Afghanistan since shortly after the US bombing began on Oct. 7. He is drumming up support among local tribes for deposed former King Zahir Shah, in exile in Rome, and has fought at least one skirmish with Taleban forces.
Surrender or fight?
Rumsfeld said commandos from other allied countries were also engaged in fighting without specifying which countries he was referring to although British and French commandos are believed be in the country.
Though no US troops had lost their lives he indicated that they had faced difficult situations on occasions, notably in recent combat in driving the Taleban from Mazar-e-Sharif in the north.
He said that non-Afghans were replacing Afghans who had defected to the opposition from the Taleban forces defending the town.
"The Afghans switch sides and they (the Taleban forces) are not Afghans," he said.
He said that the Taleban forces at Kunduz were cut off from the south where most Taleban troops had regrouped and now had only one choice "to surrender or to fight and they chose the latter. So this is still going on."
Five British Muslims were among scores of other foreign volunteers fighting for the Taleban in northern Afghanistan, officials of militant groups said in Islamabad yesterday.
There are several hundred more Pakistanis believed stranded in Afghanistan but precise figures are not available, they said.
"Five of our British Muslim volunteers were killed in Mazar-e-Sharif," Hassan Butt of the Britain-based Al-Muhajiroun group told The Associated Press in Islamabad.
They include Abdul Saleem, 25, from East London; Zulfikar Ahmed, 28, from Leicester; and Abu Waheed, 26, from Crawley. Butt refused to identify the other two.
Foreign fighters
An Afghan diplomatic source in Tajikistan said yesterday a large group of mercenaries fighting along side the Taleban have been captured by the opposition near the northern Afghan city of Kunduz.
The diplomat was unable to say how many fighters had been seized by the opposition Northern Alliance forces or where they were from. But Afghan military sources said the Taleban’s mercenary supporters included Chechens, Arabs, Pakistanis and Uzbeks from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which has been singled out by the United States in its anti-terror campaign.
Thousands of Taleban fighters and foreign mercenaries are reported to be holding out in the northern city of Kunduz near Afghanistan’s border with Tajikistan, while US forces continue bombing strikes to back up Northern Alliance attacks.
State-run Iran radio quoted an unnamed "informed source" as saying that Osama Bin Laden had probably fled for his life across the border near the remote and inaccessible region of Tirah in northwestern Pakistan.
"Bin Laden has most likely abandoned Afghanistan for the Manatiq-e-Azad (free areas) of Pakistan to save his life," the report quoted the unidentified source as saying. In Islamabad, military government’s top spokesman Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi termed the Iranian radio report as preposterous and mischievous."
"It seems to be an attempt to create turmoil and confusion," Qureshi told Reuters.
In a potential intelligence coup, Northern Alliance opposition forces on Thursday apparently captured some senior Taleban leaders, but Bin Laden remained on the run despite US assertions it was "tightening the noose" on him.
Hamid Karzai, a former Afghan deputy foreign minister who has been trying to convince the militia to surrender the city, told AFP the Taleban are still in control of Kandahar." But he said the Taleban had relinquished neighboring Uruzgan, Mulla Omar’s native province, after negotiations yesterday.
"Uruzgan province has been totally liberated from the Taleban," said Karzai, a Pashtun tribal leader who has the support of the United States. "The Taleban were in some districts for the past two or three days but they have now come under our control along with the capital, Tirin Kot."
A Pentagon spokesman said yesterday elite US and British forces were deployed to a former Soviet air base north of Kabul to prepare it for humanitarian relief operations and also for military operations if necessary.
