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US no longer control the game Who is???
Judge Dread
Member Posts: 2,372 ✭✭✭✭✭
N. Alliance Says All Foreign Troops Must Leave - Taliban Hold Kandahar11-17-1KABUL/SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The Taliban vowed on Saturday not to give up their southern Afghan stronghold of Kandahar without a fight as new cracks opened among the fractious factions and foreign forces arrayed against them. Ousted former President Burhanuddin Rabbani returned to Kabul five years after the Taliban drove him out, and his Northern Alliance said it did not want foreign troops in the country. The United Nations said the Alliance was obstructing urgent talks needed to construct a broad-based post-Taliban government. Taliban officials dismissed reports that Mullah Mohammad Omar, their reclusive supreme leader who lost an eye fighting the Soviets in the 1980s, had ordered the fundamentalist militia to retreat from Kandahar and head for the hills. The Taliban have been pounded by 42 days of relentless U.S. air strikes to punish them for harboring Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in the September 11 hijack attacks in the United States that killed some 4,600 people. "Kandahar is in complete control of the Taliban, and reports of the withdrawal of the Taliban are baseless," spokesman Maulvi Najibullah told Reuters in the small town ofSpin Boldak just over the border from Pakistan. "Life is normal in Kandahar." Mullah Omar's spokesman Mohammed Tayeb al-Agha told Qatar's al-Jazeera television that reports by the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) that the Taliban would retreat from Kandahar were "lies." "We have thousands of troops in Kandahar and in the provinces around it and we have decided to fight to retain control of them to maintain Islamic rule," he said. "The Prince of the Believers Mullah Omar and all the senior Taliban officials are in Kandahar and the provinces around it which are under our control. They have not left." AIP said the Taliban, facing a popular uprising even among fellow ethnic Pashtuns in the south, had agreed to leave the city and hand over control to two former mujahideen commanders. FAULTLINES OPEN Rabbani drove into Kabul from his Northern Alliance base in the Panjsher valley to the north of the capital, heading a cavalcade of cars. His arrival will not be widely welcomed. The Pashtun majority and Shiite groups fear the ethnic Tajik and Uzbek Northern Alliance that seized Kabul on Tuesday will try to cling to power rather than build an inclusive government. The deposed president, who still holds Afghanistan's United Nations seat, is unpopular even within some factions of the Northern Alliance. Many anti-Taliban groups want deposed former King Zahir Shah, in exile in Rome, to be the figurehead of a new regime rather than the ethnic Tajik Rabbani. After seizing the key northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif last Friday, Northern Alliance forces backed by devastating U.S. aerial firepower, made a lighting advance across the country and took Kabul on Tuesday. But worried Kabul residents well remember the vicious factional squabbles among the group's leaders when they toppled Afghanistan's communist rulers and seized the capital in 1992. They turned on each other and a civil war erupted that sparked almost daily rocket attacks on Kabul that killed 50,000 residents in five years. Banditry and lawlessness were rife as warlords carved up the country into their own personal fiefdoms. There are ominous signs history could be repeating itself. Factions in the Northern Alliance have already split the capital along ethnic lines. Shiite groups with uneasy relations with the Tajiks and Uzbeks moved into territory in southwest Kabul where the factions fought bitter battles in the 1990s. Pashtun leaders in southern Afghanistan, meanwhile, are trying to negotiate a bloodless settlement with the Taliban and have warned the Northern Alliance not to march on Kandahar. The United Nations -- scrambling to catch up after the military advance of the Northern Alliance far outstripped political progress in agreeing a future government -- wants urgent talks on a political solution that includes all ethnic groups and in which the exiled former king may play a key role. But Lakhdar Brahimi, U.N. envoy in charge of Afghanistan said on Friday the Northern Alliance was obstructing urgent efforts to arrange a crucial meeting on the country's political future. Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said after his troops entered Kabul that such a meeting should take place in Kabul itself among all groups except the Taliban. But the U.N. wants a meeting in a neutral location. Seeking to end the power vacuum, U.N. envoy Francesc Vendrell arrived in Kabul ahead of meetings with Northern Alliance leaders to invite them to a U.N. conference on the country's future. Analysts say building a coherent government from factions that have mistrusted, fought and double-crossed each other for centuries is far easier in theory than in practice. FOREIGN TROOPS NOT WELCOME Senior officials of the Northern Alliance also said on Saturday that foreign forces -- who played an essential role in enabling the opposition military gains -- were now not welcome. The Northern Alliance opposed the deployment of troops such as the 100 British special forces who arrived at Bagram airbase near Kabul a day earlier and French forces who were en route, a senior alliance official told Reuters. Abdullah had already spoken with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and more talks were expected between the two sides later on Saturday. "The most important word is that we allow no country to use Afghanistan as a base... If some countries want to do so then this is a very major political issue," Engineer Arif, deputy chief of the intelligence, said. Northern Alliance forces said on Saturday that apart from a handful who could be left behind for humanitarian help, the British troops would have to leave. Aside from Kandahar, the only major Taliban redoubt left in Afghanistan is the northern province and city of Kunduz. The opposition said thousands of Pakistani, Arab and Chechen fighters under siege in the enclave were fighting to the death, aware they had nowhere to run. "We have surrounded the Kunduz province but unfortunately we have not captured it yet," said Zubai, a Northern Alliance Foreign Ministry official, speaking by telephone from Taloqan about 37 miles to the east of Kunduz. "The mayor of Kunduz is negotiating with local Taliban and they say we will give up the city for you. But the foreign Taliban will never accept this." The reports could not be independently verified. A U.S. official said Mohammed Atef, a right hand man of Osama bin Laden and whose daughter married one of the Saudi-born militant's sons this year, was killed by a U.S. bomb near Kabul. Atef was believed killed south of Kabul on Wednesday or Thursday as the United States tightened its net around bin Laden. Intelligence services had identified Atef as the military planner of the September 11 attacks on the United States and the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for which the former Egyptian policeman was on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's "most wanted" list. Islamabad denied as "preposterous and mischievous" an Iranian radio report that bin Laden had fled from Afghanistan into Pakistan's northwestern tribal areas. Copyright 2001 Reuters News Service. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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