KUNDUZ - Hundreds of Taliban said to be surrendering

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Nov 24, 2001

Hundreds of Kunduz Defenders Said to Be Surrendering as Northern Alliance Moves to Take Besieged City

By Ellen Knickmeyer Associated Press Writer

BANGI, Afghanistan (AP) - Six hundred foreign fighters believed loyal to Osama bin Laden handed over their weapons to anti-Taliban forces Saturday, the northern alliance said as it marched on the besieged city of Kunduz.

An alliance commander characterized the handover as the beginning of a wholesale surrender of the defenders of Kunduz, but fears remained that other foreign fighters inside the city would choose to fight to the death rather than turn themselves in.

"The 600 foreign fighters, who are Chechens, Arabs, and some Pakistanis, surrendered with their weapons," said Amanullah Khan, a northern alliance spokesman.

An alliance commander on the other side of the city, Gen. Daoud Khan, said more surrenders were expected. "It has just started. Maybe another 700 more will be handed over. We should have all these prisoners handed over in next day or two days."

The surrender took place in the village of Qalai Qul Mohammed, west of Kunduz, where the foreign fighters were surrounded after breaking through alliance front lines, alliance commanders said.

The surrendering fighters were taken to the nearby city of Mazar-e-Sharif by forces of the three main generals in northern Afghanistan: Rashid Dostum, Atta Mohammed and Mohammed Mohaqik.

More foreign fighters were believed holed up in Kunduz itself, which alliance forces vowed to take after 12 days in which the front lines changed little.

"Maybe tonight or tomorrow we will enter into Kunduz," Gen. Khan said on Kunduz's eastern front line.

The Taliban governor trapped in the city - whose name, like the Taliban supreme leader, is Mohammed Omar - said his fighters would walk out "peacefully and unarmed."

Speaking by satellite telephone from inside Kunduz, he told Britain's Channel 4 television: "The Taliban brothers who are from other provinces of Afghanistan, they have a way out."

But it was unclear whether he spoke for the foreign fighters as well, who have no such guarantees for free passage out of Kunduz.

Under a deal negotiated between the alliance and the Taliban in recent days, the foreign fighters are to be put in detention camps pending an investigation into their links to bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network.

Gen. Khan said the foreigners would be tried in "Islamic courts" in Afghanistan.

But many feared the alliance fighters, whose hatred of the foreign fighters is intense, would slaughter them rather than send them to trial.

An American official in Washington said some of the fighters in the besieged city may be deputies and lieutenants to bin Laden, the chief suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks which sparked the U.S.-led attacks on the Taliban.

It had been feared that those inside Kunduz would choose to fight to the death.

Ordering a commander to march on Kunduz on Saturday morning, Gen. Khan said: "Bring up the tanks and troops to go into Kunduz. If the foreigners fight you, fight."

At the United Nations, officials announced a one-day delay for a conference in Germany aimed at paving the way for a new Afghan government following the Taliban's collapse. The meeting will now open Tuesday because of delays in getting participants to the venue in Bonn, U.N. spokesman Ahmad Fawzi said.

In the days before the surrender began, Gen. Khan said, he believed Pakistani fighters were fleeing by plane out of the city's half-destroyed airport, although a spokesman for the U.S. military said there was nothing to indicate any such evacuation.

"We control the skies over Afghanistan and we would not let anyone fly out and take people who we have repeatedly said wouldn't be allowed to leave," Marine Corps Lt. Col. David Lapan said in Washington.

Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has repeatedly appealed for measures to save Pakistani fighters who joined the Taliban side, fearing they face slaughter if the northern alliance seizes the city.

A militant Islamic group in Pakistan, which claims to have sent thousands of Pakistanis to fight alongside the Taliban, threatened to target Afghan refugees in Pakistan if its supporters are executed in Kunduz.

"People are angry and will target Afghan refugees belonging to northern alliance areas if our people are executed or treated unfairly," said Maulvi Mohammed Khalid Khan, one of the group's leaders.

Alliance troops had already been moving incrementally toward Kunduz. Gen. Khan said his fighters moved Friday into the Taliban-held town of Aliabad, just south of Kunduz, where militia fighters gave up without a fight. A U.S. official also reported fighting near the town of Khanabad, just to the east.

Fighting also continued further south near Kabul in the village of Maidan Shahr, where alliance fighters have been attacking Taliban holdouts in the rocky, barren hills.

And in the area outside the eastern city of Jalalabad, where bin Laden was spotted just before the U.S.-led bombing began and could still be hiding in caves, U.S. bombs continued to fall overnight and early Saturday.

A U.S. official reported Friday that the northern alliance might be making its move toward the Taliban's last remaining area of control, in the south.

Advance elements of an alliance force have entered Helmand province, just to the west of the Taliban base of Kandahar, the official said.

AP-ES-11-24-01 0425EST

This story can be found at : http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGADLL18FUC.html

-- Anonymous, November 24, 2001

Answers

BBC - Taleban troops in Kunduz surrender

Alliance troops are massing around Kunduz

At least 1,000 Taleban fighters have surrendered to commanders of the Northern Alliance, as alliance forces tighten their grip around the city of Kunduz,

Alliance commanders say they are hopeful this is the start of a general surrender of all Taleban forces in the city, the last Taleban foothold in the north.

The BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, reporting from outside the city, says about 20 vehicles full of armed Taleban came out of Kunduz.

Still carrying their rifles and grenade launchers, they headed for the town of Taloqan to surrender.

There are reports that a further 600 Taleban - including some non-Afghans - have given themelves in to forces under the command of Uzbek General Rashid Dostum outside the nearby city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

"Six hundred people have surrendered to us. Some of them are foreign mercenaries," General Dostum told Reuters news agency.

Click here for map of the battlegrounds

"We will now separate the local Taleban forces from the foreigners."

Another Northern Alliance spokesman, Amanullah Khan, said the fighters, believed to include Pakistanis, Chechens and Arabs, had been brought to Mazar on Friday night.

In other developments:

Former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani says he has no "personal ambitions" in a future administration The United Nations food agency has begun airlifting supplies to the mountainous north-east of Afghanistan UN-sponsored talks on Afghanistan's future, due to be held in the German city of Bonn, are delayed until Tuesday A grave containing the bodies of 12 mujahideen with their hands tied behind their backs is discovered near the western Afghan city of Herat

The partial surrender follows 10 days of withering bombardment from Northern Alliance forces backed by US B-52 bombers, which are said to have been in action again on Saturday.

Terrified civilians have been fleeing the city, braving the bombing in order to escape to safety, but tens of thousands remain trapped.

Northern Alliance forces have meanwhile been advancing on the town of Khanabad, a key gateway to Kunduz.

A correspondent for the French news agency AFP watched alliance fighters armed with mortars and machine guns attacking the village of Devairone, about five kilometres south of Khanabad.

Earlier, the alliance said they had taken over the small town of Aliabad, just south-west of Khanabad, without a fight.

Further south, there appears to have been an agreement between the northern Alliance and Taleban forces to end the fighting in Maidan Shahr, a village about 30 kilometres (20 miles) south-west of Kabul.

The BBC's Nick Childs says it is not clear whether the Taleban agreed to surrender all their weapons, but he saw Northern Alliance troops heading towards Taleban lines to oversee a handover.

'Surrender deal'

With events moving swiftly in Kunduz, General Dostum is claiming to have struck a deal for the handover of the city on Sunday.

But our correspondent says such claims have been made before and little has changed on the ground.

The deal would reportedly allow Afghan Taleban soldiers to lay down their weapons and return to their home provinces in the south.

But there would be no such safe passage for foreign Taleban fighters.

Both Pakistan and Britain say the US-led coalition against terrorism is working hard to avoid a potential massacre of the thousands of non-Afghan fighters trapped in Kunduz.

Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah told the BBC that the foreign fighters would be treated as prisoners or war according to international guidelines, but the treatment of foreigners during the fall of Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif has raised concerns.

The International Red Cross says it has found between 400 and 600 bodies in Mazar-e-Sharif following its capture by the Northern Alliance.

It is unclear whether they were killed during the fighting, or after the capture of the city.

A further complication is the reported tension between Uzbek and Tajik factions of the Northern Alliance.

A Taleban spokesman told Reuters that his forces had reached surrender terms with General Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, on Thursday, but that forces loyal to ousted President Burhanuddin Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik, were unwilling to accept the deal.



-- Anonymous, November 24, 2001

I'll believe it when the women are walking around with their faces uncovered again.

-- Anonymous, November 24, 2001

Some of the women actually prefer to wear the veil. They say it gives them a feeling of security or privacy. Something like that.

-- Anonymous, November 24, 2001

Well, if they're walking past a construction site. . .

-- Anonymous, November 24, 2001

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