^^^7:45 AM ET^^^ TALEBAN - Make final stands in two remaining strongholds

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Taliban make final stands in two remaining strongholds

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Vernon Loeb The Washington Post Posted November 16 2001

WASHINGTON -- U.S. warplanes pounded Taliban lines around Kunduz on Thursday as a Taliban envoy in Pakistan sought U.N. intervention to help arrange a bloodless surrender for the besieged enclave in northern Afghanistan. At the other end of the country, in the southern city of Kandahar, Taliban defenders held out another day against Pashtun tribal guerrillas aided by U.S. special forces and resupplied by U.S. helicopters.

The battles at Kunduz and Kandahar represented the last two stands in major cities by the tattered Taliban militia, whose five-year rule over Afghanistan has melted away over the last week in the face of relentless U.S. bombing, a military sweep by the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance and uprisings by warlords in the central and southern Pashtun areas that the Taliban once considered its home base.

“It’s been said we are tightening the noose, and that, in fact, is the case,” said Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S. forces in the Afghan war. “We are tightening the noose. It’s a matter of time.”

Franks, appearing at his second Pentagon briefing since the war began Oct. 7, said U.S. commandos are working to advise and resupply the Pashtun opposition groups and designate targets for air strikes for U.S. warplanes around both embattled cities. But he also made it clear special operations teams around Kandahar are performing missions well beyond the liaison and targeting tasks carried out earlier in the war.

Asked whether the special forces will seek to exploit Taliban setbacks to launch more raids in search of the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, and Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al-Qaida terrorist network, Franks responded: “We have had forces engaged in this sort of activity for some time. We have that sort of activity ongoing as we speak — direct action, reconnaissance.

In western Afghanistan, more than 100 soldiers, including at least 19 prominent Taliban leaders, were captured by troops loyal to the Northern Alliance. Many of the men had changed their appearance by cutting their hair and shaving their beards.

Although that made positive identification difficult, turncoat Taliban forces tentatively fingered three of the men as Mannan Niazi, the former governor of Kabul; Mullah Baradar, former governor of Herat; and Mullah Samad, former head of police in Herat.

The arrests could provide the United States with more valuable information on Taliban operations.

Meanwhile, U.N. and Pakistani sources said a Taliban envoy was in Islamabad asking U.N. representatives in the Pakistani capital to broker a surrender at Kunduz to prevent retribution killings by Northern Alliance forces that have closed in on both sides. Some alliance commanders near Kunduz have threatened to execute any captured Taliban fighters, who they say include Pakistani, Chechen and Arab volunteers particularly despised by Afghan opposition forces.

Although U.N. officials welcomed the Taliban offer, they said the world body does not have the ability to handle a surrender, the sources said. Instead, the U.N. officials said they would urge the alliance to respect international conventions on prisoners of war.

“We don’t have the setup to deal with this,” said one U.N. official, who predicted the Taliban could face a “bloodbath” around Kunduz. “If they stay they will be slaughtered,” the official said. “And if they surrender to the Northern Alliance, they will be slaughtered.”

Although Northern Alliance leaders have insisted they would not execute Taliban prisoners, U.N. officials said they think more than 500 Taliban soldiers were killed by alliance forces during the capture of Mazar-e Sharif. Smaller numbers of captured Taliban fighters have been killed in other areas seized by the alliance, according to witnesses and aid agency officials.

U.N. and Pakistani officials said they thought the offer to surrender in Kunduz represented the views of senior Taliban leaders. But they were unsure what the Taliban intends to do given the United Nations’ inability to arrange a surrender.

Gen. Mohammed Dawood, an alliance commander near Kunduz, said he would not negotiate with non-Afghan Taliban members, whom he accused of playing a role in the assassination of the alliance’s leader, Ahmed Shah Massood, in September. “There will be no negotiations,” he said. “We will not deal with them. They are killers.”

U.S. officials said several members of al-Qaida are thought to be among the thousands of Taliban in Kunduz.

Most of the other Taliban fighters who are still resisting have concentrated in and around the southern city of Kandahar, where ethnic Pashtun tribesmen seeking to drive them from the city moved closer, opposition leaders said. Some tribesmen engaged in gun battles with Taliban forces Thursday north and south of the city, the leaders said.

Tribal elders also have increased efforts to persuade the Taliban in Kandahar to relinquish power peacefully. Several tribal leaders said they would send a delegation to Kandahar to talk with senior Taliban officials there soon.

At the border crossing, Pakistani military sources said that on Wednesday, the Taliban leadership rejected a call for a meeting from Gul Agha Shirzai and Hamid Karzai, two Pashtun tribal leaders leading insurrections. Karzai, a former deputy foreign minister in a pre-Taliban government who has received support from the United States to build a Pashtun opposition movement, said on the BBC’s Pashto service that he asked the Taliban to lay down their weapons and return home to live in peace.

“The Taliban are Afghans, too,” he said. “They can go to their homes in peace. They can play a role in government. They can ask for their rights.”

Karzai, according to his relatives in Quetta, has sparked an anti-Taliban uprising among Populzai tribesmen in central Afghanistan’s Urugzan province. Several of his commanders were reported to be skirmishing with Taliban forces north of Kandahar. Members of another tribe, the Achakzais, were fighting to the south of Kandahar, near the airport, said Sardar Mohammed Akram, a tribal commander who lives in Quetta.

In Quetta, a group of tribal leaders said they plan to send a delegation to Kandahar comprising representatives from six southern provinces to urge the Taliban to give up power peacefully.

Information from the Los Angeles Times was used to supplement this report.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2001


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