KABUL/WASHINGTON, 12 December — Afghan fighters chased Osama Bin Laden’s forces to “one last base” in the mountains yesterday as conflicting reports poured in about surrender of Al-Qaeda men and US warplanes rained bombs on Tora Bora hills.
Tribal forces said they pushed die-hard fighters from Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda (“the base”) network into a final stronghold near Tora Bora in the east.
“Bin Laden’s supporters are now confined to one last base,” commander Muhammad Amin said.
Gul Agha,, new governor of Kandahar, said some of Al-Qaeda and Taleban fighters were besieged inside Sini Hospital in Kandahar refusing to surrender.
Haji Muhammad Zaman, one of three commanders engaged in a furious eight-day battle against the last Al-Qaeda stronghold of Tora Bora said yesterday Al-Qaeda fighters agreed to surrender to the US-backed Afghan militia who have them surrounded on the rugged summits of eastern Afghanistan. “It’s finished,” Zaman told journalists. “They (Al-Qaeda) told us: ‘We don’t want to fight with you, we surrender’.” Zaman said the mostly foreign Al-Qaeda fighters had agreed to come down from their mountain peak at 8 a.m. (0330 GMT) Wednesday.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, however said in Washington that he had “no confirmation” of the surrender announced by Zaman.
The whereabouts of Bin Laden remained a mystery and officials in neighboring Pakistan said they were pouring extra troops into their Afghan border to prevent any infiltration by fleeing Bin Laden forces — or the man himself.
An Interior Ministry official in Islamabad told AFP: “The entire border area opposite Tora Bora is virtually sealed and there is constant surveillance by helicopter gunships.”
Commander Zaman, who has been insisting for days that Bin Laden is also holed up with the last of his fanatical fighters in the forbidding White Mountain range, acknowledged that he was no longer sure. “Until today I was sure he was here,” he said. “Now I don’t know exactly.”
According to the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP), Zaman said the Al-Qaeda fighters would be handed over to the United Nations if they surrendered as arranged.
In Washington, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that US forces had yet to achieve their goals. “A wounded animal can be dangerous,” Rumsfeld said.
In Kabul, UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi emerged from talks with the leaders who will run Afghanistan after Dec. 22, seemingly optimistic on the thorniest issue on his agenda: the deployment of an international security force in demilitarized Kabul.
This was a key clause in the historic UN-brokered inter-Afghan deal reached last week in Bonn, but the Northern Alliance, which holds power in Kabul, said Monday that it would not withdraw all its soldiers from the Afghan capital.
“I can say that there is no opposition from the authorities for an international military presence,” Brahimi told a news conference after a day of talks with senior officials, including Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah and Defense Minister Muhammad Qasim Fahim.
But, he added, “operational issues” such as the size of the force, its mission and the withdrawal of Alliance soldiers from Kabul still had to be agreed.
Fahim said yesterday that a multinational force expected to deploy in the Afghan capital would be limited to 1,000 men.
According to Afghan sources close to Al-Qaeda, the Algerian members of the organization have broken ranks with Al-Qaeda protesting Bin Laden’s fortifying himself in the caves without participating in the fighting.
In another development, Washington is concerned over the presence of an unidentified sheikh in the Bin Laden tape which is expected to be released today.
In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair said Britain was willing “to play a leading role” in the force, but stressed after talks with US Secretary of State Colin Powell that a formal decision had yet to be made.
In southern Afghanistan, US Marines set up checkpoints in the Kandahar area to seize weapons from Taleban and Al-Qaeda fighters fleeing the former Taleban bastion that fell to tribal forces on Friday.
“If they’re Taleban and they lay down their weapons immediately, they will be allowed to go their merry way,” said Capt. Stewart Upton, a spokesman for the US Marines at the Camp Rhino desert base in southern Afghanistan.
“If they’re Al-Qaeda, they will be apprehended, unless they show any kind of hostile intent, in which case they will be killed,” he said.
Meanwhile, a Frenchman became the first person to be indicted over the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States yesterday, US Attorney General John Ashcroft announced. Three months to the day after the attacks, Zacarias Moussaoui, 33, who is of Moroccan origin, was charged on six counts, ranging from conspiracy to commit terrorist acts, destroy aircraft and murder US employees, to conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction.
In an interview yesterday in the Washington Post, Hamid Karzai, the head of the interim Cabinet to take power on Dec. 22, appealed to the US not to abandon Afghanistan as it did after helping defeat the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation.
“Things went wrong in Afghanistan because the United States walked away,” he said. “So don’t walk away again.”
Meanwhile, hundreds of heavily armed Pashtun muscled their way into the former Taleban bastion of Kandahar yesterday in an apparent grab for a share of power, a witness said.
During the jockeying, one commander said there were still pockets of Taleban fighters and members of Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network holed up in the city refusing to surrender.
Kandahar Governor Gul Agha pledged yesterday to capture Mulla Omar claiming he had information that the Taleban leader was still in the province.
“If he is still in Kandahar it’s my responsibility to go after him and capture him and hand him over to international justice,” Agha told reporters. “We have some reports that he is still somewhere around the borderline with Helmand province — the exact information we do not want to say for security reasons.”
About 1,000 bodies of victims of fighting between Taleban and Afghan militia forces are believed to be lying around Kandahar airport, humanitarian sources in Kabul said yesterday citing witnesses.
“The fighting was very fierce and lasted for a long time. We believe that this figure of 1,000 dead is not unrealistic,” the sources said. According to a report carried by a Pakistani newspaper, some 70 wounded Arab supporters of the Taleban were slaughtered in their hospital beds in Kandahar after the city fell to the anti-Taleban tribal forces.
In all, more than 200 Arabs were killed in the takeover of the last bastion of the militia in southern Afghanistan, the newspaper said.
Earlier, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said yesterday he hoped the Northern Alliance, now in power in Afghanistan, would not block the deployment of a UN stabilization force in the country.
Annan was speaking after the Northern Alliance declared that the UN-mandated security force would not be allowed to patrol Kabul.
“I am hopeful that the Afghans will cooperate” with the deployment of the force, whose aim is to ensure stability and safe distribution of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan, Annan told reporters in Oslo after talks with Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik.
In remarks apparently designed to put Iraq, Iran and North Korea on notice, President Bush said the United States “cannot accept” other countries’ providing terrorists with weapons of mass destruction or the means to deliver them, including missiles, and held out the defeated Taleban as an example of their fate should they continue to sponsor terrorists.
