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Northern alliance gives Taliban three days
By KATHY GANNON
Associated Press Writer
11/20/01
KABUL, Afghanistan — The northern alliance told the Taliban Tuesday to surrender the city of Kunduz in three days or face assault. Afghanistan's former president gave his qualified approval for U.N.-brokered power-sharing talks abroad.
The statement appeared to clear the way for a meeting of Afghan factions this weekend in Germany to discuss a multiethnic, post-Taliban government. But the head of the northern alliance, Burhanuddin Rabbani, told CNN that such a gathering would be mainly "symbolic'' and that real decision-making must take place inside Afghanistan.
Rabbani has demanded the talks be held in the Afghan capital, Kabul, where his alliance faction is in control. The United Nations has been pressing for a conference on neutral ground in Europe. A Pakistani source said the meeting was likely to be held in Germany, probably Berlin, on Saturday.
Rabbani served as president from 1992 until the Taliban ousted him in 1996 and has never given up his claim to be the head of government.
"There is really a hunger for peace,'' James F. Dobbins, the U.S. envoy to the alliance, said in Pakistan after meeting its leaders near Kabul.
"There's a willingness to compromise,'' he told reporters. "There's a recognition that the international situation is transformed.''
Also Tuesday, the bodies of four international journalists were recovered and identified by colleagues, a day after their convoy was ambushed in a narrow mountain pass on the road to the Afghan capital, Kabul.
The Taliban's sole remaining redoubt in the north of Afghanistan is the city of Kunduz, which has been under siege by alliance troops while American warplanes bomb Taliban positions on its outskirts.
Alliance spokesman Attiq Ullah, speaking from the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, said fighters loyal to Osama bin Laden — mainly Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis — had been preventing the Taliban from giving up Kunduz.
He said there would be an assault on Kunduz after three days if the Taliban and their foreign allies had not surrendered.
"If there is a fight in Kunduz, it will be a bloody one because there are 3,000 foreign fighters and they have nowhere to go,'' he said.
A northern alliance commander, Gen. Mohammed Daoud, said Taliban had shot 470 of their own fighters in the past days after learning they planned to surrender. Three hundred of them were mowed down together with their commander, he said.
Refugees had reported the killing of up to 300 Taliban soldiers last week by shots fired from their own side.
Outside Kunduz, B-52s staged a sixth straight day of airstrikes Tuesday despite heavy cloud cover. U.S. bombardment was also reported Tuesday in the Taliban's home base, the southern city of Kandahar.
Pashtun tribal leaders have been trying to persuade Taliban leaders — who are ethnic brethren — to give up the city.
International negotiators are working on the critical issue of stabilizing the tribally fractured country.
U.N. officials and diplomats said in New York late Monday that Lakhdar Brahimi, the top U.N. envoy for Afghanistan, met privately in New York with the major Security Council members and was expected to announce the meeting would take place Saturday in Berlin.
The United Nations said that the victorious northern alliance has not yet formally accepted Secretary-General Kofi Annan's invitation to an all-parties conference. However, alliance leaders have assured U.S. officials they will take part.
Alliance leaders asked the United Nations to find representatives from the Pashtuns, the ethnic group most closely linked to the Taliban, to attend the talks. The alliance consists mainly of ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. The Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group, may not accept a new government unless they play a major role.
In the eastern city of Jalalabad, colleagues identified the bodies of four journalists who had been reported missing and feared dead after Monday's ambush: Australian television cameraman Harry Burton and Azizullah Haidari, an Afghan photographer, both of the Reuters news agency; Maria Grazia Cutuli of Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera; and Julio Fuentes of the Spanish daily El Mundo.
The four were among more than a dozen international journalists traveling in a convoy of around eight cars from the eastern city of Jalalabad to the capital, Kabul.
Gunmen who identified themselves as Taliban ordered the journalists out of the cars and tried to force them into the mountains. When they refused, the gunmen opened fire, said two drivers and a translator with the convoy.
Haji Shershah, an anti-Taliban commander in Jalalabad, said he believed the attackers were bandits, not Taliban or his own fighters.
In southern Afghanistan, U.S. officials reminded local tribesmen of the $25 million reward for finding bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
"Our best intelligence says that Osama bin Laden and his senior aides are still in Afghanistan,'' Kenton Keith, a coalition spokesman in Pakistan, told reporters in Islamabad on Tuesday. He declined to provide specifics, other than to say bin Laden was not pinned down in a single area.
Authorities in Pakistan have detained at least 15 foreign nationals who crossed the Afghan frontier in connection with possible links to bin Laden, officials said Tuesday.
The detainees are from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Afghanistan, said a government spokesman in southwestern city of Quetta, Azmat Hanif said.
Also detained was Fazle Razzaq, a member of a Pakistan-based militant group who was picked up by authorities in the Pakistani city of Peshawar. He is also being questioned about possible bin Laden links.