Taliban flees and alliance takes Kabul

By Kathy Gannon

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban military forces deserted the capital of Kabul at dawn today after a series of stunning military victories by opposition forces over the past four days.

As they left, the Taliban took eight foreign aid workers — including two Americans, Heather Mercer, 24, and Dayna Curry, 30 — that had been jailed in Kabul, accused of spreading Christianity in Muslim Afghanistan, witnesses said.

Northern Alliance forces moved into the capital in pickup trucks loaded with soldiers armed with rifles and rocket launchers. There was no shooting as the opposition forces took over a military barracks that only hours before had been in Taliban hands.

The opposition soldiers worked their way through neighborhoods, doing house-to-house searches looking for any remaining Taliban soldiers and their Arab supporters.

As the sun rose over the Hindu Kush mountains, residents of Kabul could be heard shouting out congratulations to one another, honking car horns and ringing bells on their bicycles.

From the rooftop of the Intercontinental Hotel on a hill overlooking Kabul columns of Taliban vehicles could be seen heading south beginning Monday night. The exodus continued after sunrise.

"I think it is great news. It means the initial phase of the campaign is going well," Army Secretary Thomas White said.

White said he thought "a combination of well-targeted air power along with movement on the ground by Northern Alliance forces" prompted the Taliban to flee Kabul.

Weeks of bombing by the United States weakened the Taliban sufficiently for the Northern Alliance to move across enemy lines. President Bush launched the air campaign on Oct. 7 after the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

The Taliban forces, which took control of Kabul in 1996, were heading south toward the town of Maidan Shahr. The fighters seemed ready to fall back toward the last major Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

The opposition had broken through Taliban front lines Monday and taken the hills above Kabul after a string of victories that started Friday with the taking of Mazar-e-Sharif.

The anti-Taliban forces, a coalition of factions and ethnic groups, capped their four-day dash across the north by overrunning western Afghanistan’s biggest city, Herat. Commanders said they were pushing toward Kunduz, the last Taliban-held city in the north.

At the United Nations, the United States, Russia and six nations that border Afghanistan pledged "to establish a broad-based Afghan administration on an urgent basis."

The aim is to put together a transitional leadership that is broadly acceptable, possibly including Taliban defectors. The United Nations might take interim control of the capital, and Muslim and non-Muslim nations are likely to join with Turkey in providing peacekeepers, U.S. officials said.

Likely participants with Turkey in a combined peacekeeping force from Muslim and non-Muslim countries include Indonesia, Bangladesh and Jordan, U.S. officials said.