WASHINGTON/KABUL, 4 January — Taleban holdouts offered yesterday to surrender their supreme leader Mulla Muhammad Omar in exchange for an end to the US bombing of their positions in southern Afghanistan, an Afghan intelligence official said. If it happens, the surrender of Mulla Omar to the Afghan authorities would signal a major success in the 12-week-old US-led campaign to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden and eradicate his Al-Qaeda organization and their erstwhile Taleban protectors.
Also yesterday, American paratroopers flew in to join the hunt for remnants of Bin Laden’s fighters. With airstrikes easing, US forces on the ground are focusing on the hunt for Taleban leaders and for Bin Laden and members of Al-Qaeda network, which Washington holds responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. But the trail of Bin Laden himself seems to have gone cold in the mountainous expanse dividing Afghanistan from Pakistan.
The Pentagon said on Wednesday that hundreds of soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division had arrived at a military airfield in the former Taleban stronghold of Kandahar, allowing more than 1,000 Marines already there to be diverted to other duties. There have also been reports that US Special Forces are operating in an area close to where Omar may have taken refuge.
One of the largest US Marine operations in Afghanistan discovered an Al-Qaeda compound in Helmand province, east of Kandahar, that had been used in recent weeks but provided little new information about Bin Laden’s network, US newspapers said. Some 200 Marines were involved in the raid, the New York Times and Washington Post said. Helicopter gunships and Harrier fighter jets covered their two-day sortie from Kandahar airport.
Taleban commander Abdul Ahad, also known as Rayes Baghran — chief of Baghran — said he too would surrender along with his force of up to 1,500 men in Helmand, Nasratullah Nasrat of the Kandahar intelligence service told AFP by telephone. "Rayes Baghran promised today that he will hand over Mulla Omar and (that his fighters) will lay down their weapons if the aerial bombardment is halted," he said.
He said the offer came yesterday after a three-day "shoura" — a meeting of tribal elders — in Helmand. The Taleban warlord told the shoura that his forces included militiamen who fled other regions of Afghanistan as Taleban rule collapsed around them, as well as some Bin Laden fighters. The report came as a force of 800 Afghan troops swept through the Chapparhar district of eastern Nangarhar province, bordering Pakistan, in a mopping up operation in quest of Al-Qaeda stragglers.
British bomb disposal experts, meanwhile, raced against the clock to remove land mines and unexploded ordnance from five sites around Kabul that will be home to the new, UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force. Afghan officials had threatened on Wednesday to launch a major operation involving up to 5,000 soldiers backed by US Marines, to flush Omar out if the talks failed.
In Islamabad, Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taleban ambassador to Pakistan and one of the most visible faces of the now-defunct hard-line Muslim regime, was taken from his residence for questioning by Pakistani security officials, his family said.
The surrender of Omar and what is presumably the last major pocket of Taleban resistance should be settled through talks and not through war, Nasrat quoted Abdul Ahad as saying. "Baghran district had been heavily bombarded, which is why they are talking of the surrender of their weapons and the handover of Omar," Nasrat said.
"Inshallah (God willing), we may get to an agreement because they have no other way," Nasrat said. "They have been absolutely blockaded and besieged. Baghran is a small district, too small for 1,000 to 1,500 people." He said Abdul Ahad was also negotiating with Haji Shir Muhammad, the Helmand provincial governor who has proclaimed allegiance to Afghanistan’s interim leader Hamid Karzai. "If the Taleban couldn’t resist in the whole of Afghanistan, how can they resist in a small district like Baghran?" Nasrat said.
