Wednesday, November 14, 2001

N. Alliance moves into Afghan capital
By Kathy Gannon
Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ignoring appeals to stay out of the capital, Afghan opposition fighters rolled into Kabul on Tuesday after Taliban troops fled. Residents, freed of the Islamic militia’s restrictions, celebrated by blaring music from radios and shaving their beards.

Under heavy international pressure to share power, the alliance’s foreign minister, Abdullah, said all Afghan factions — except the Taliban — were invited to Kabul to negotiate a new government. The alliance also asked the United Nations to send teams to help the peace process, he said.

The top U.N. envoy for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, outlined for the Security Council on Tuesday a plan for a two-year transitional government run by Afghans and backed by a multinational security force.

Abdullah said most alliance troops had stayed on the edge of the capital and that a smaller force had entered only to keep the peace and prevent lawlessness after Taliban fighters slipped out of the city under cover of night.

But there were concerns over reprisals by alliance fighters. Heavily armed troops roamed the city, hunting Taliban stragglers and their Arab allies from Osama bin Laden’s al-Queda movement. At least 11 Pakistanis and Arabs fighting for the Taliban were slain.

The United Nations reported that alliance fighters executed 100 Taliban in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif after capturing the city Friday. Abdullah denied the report.

In Washington, President Bush said the United States would “work with the northern alliance commanders to make sure they respect the human rights of the people they are liberating.”

Bush, speaking at a joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, said alliance leaders must “recognize that a future government must include a representative from all of Afghanistan.”

Bush, who had urged the alliance to stay out of Kabul until a broad-based government is formed, said that since entering the city, alliance leaders had “made it very clear they had no intention of occupying Kabul.”

British Prime Minister Tony Blair called for a U.N. presence in Kabul to be established “as soon as possible” in the Afghan capital. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said the United Nations should send in a peacekeeping force made up of Muslim countries to prevent bloodshed, saying Pakistan and Turkey could contribute.

In Washington, a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the hardline Islamic Taliban movement that has ruled Afghanistan since 1996 was collapsing in disarray. Field commanders were fleeing without contact with the leadership, and some were switching sides, the official said.

The official said an armed force of Pashtuns — the ethnic group that has made up the backbone of the Taliban — were moving against the Taliban near the southern city of Kandahar, the militia’s birthplace and headquarters. The official would not elaborate.

At least 200 Taliban fighters mutinied in Kandahar, and fighting broke out by the city’s airport, a Taliban official, Mullah Najibullah, said at the Pakistani border at Chaman.

The Taliban supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, made a radio address denouncing deserters and urging his followers to fight, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press reported.

“This is my order: that you should obey your commander,” Omar said, according to the agency. Deserters “would be like a hen and die in some ditch.” The agency quoted him as saying he was in Kandahar, though that could not be independently verified.

There were signs the Taliban were abandoning cities in the south, possibly to wage a guerrilla war from the mountains. A Kandahar resident contacted by telephone said many Taliban appeared to have left the city, except for uniformed militia police.

U.S. airstrikes continued Tuesday, with warplanes targeting caves thought to be hiding places for al-Queda figures, another U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.

As the Taliban retreated from Kabul, they took eight foreign aid workers, including two Americans, accused of spreading Christianity in Muslim Afghanistan, guards at the prison where they were held told The Associated Press. The workers were reportedly taken to Kandahar.

As the sun rose over the Hindu Kush mountains, Kabul residents celebrated the end of Taliban rule over the city. They shouted out congratulations, honked car horns and rang bells on their bicycles. Men shaved off beards — mandated by the Taliban — and the sounds of music returned after having been banned by the Islamic militia.

Alliance Interior Minister Yunis Qanoni said 3,000 security troops were deployed in the city to maintain order and guard the offices of international agencies. Some offices, including those of the Red Cross and the embassy of Pakistan, have been looted.

Abdullah defended the alliance move into Kabul, saying that after the Taliban left, armed “irresponsible people” caused disturbances. “There was no option for us but to send our security forces into Kabul,” he said.

The opposition alliance is largely made up of ethnic minorities, particularly Tajiks and Uzbeks, and is burdened with a past of factional fighting that killed some 50,000 people in Kabul when they last held the city, from 1992 to 1996.

Abdullah said there was a “popular uprising” at the eastern city of Jalalabad. There was no independent confirmation. Taliban guards Tuesday also abandoned the Torkham border station along the Pakistani frontier.

U.S. intelligence believes that Taliban forces are also abandoning Kunduz, their last stronghold in northern Afghanistan, a U.S. official said.

U.N. spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker, speaking in Islamabad, reported that 100 Taliban soldiers hiding in a school in Mazar-e-Sharif were executed on Saturday and said the opposition was still carrying out “punitive action” there.