Taliban stronghold under siege

ASSOCIATED PRESS

BANGI, Afghanistan — The battle for the Taliban’s last northern stronghold of Kunduz intensified Monday, and international negotiators reportedly agreed to meet this weekend in Germany to discuss forming a new broad-based Afghan government.

More signs of normalcy took hold in the capital, Kabul, as television returned to the air and a movie theater reopened. Both were shut down during the ousted Taliban’s harsh five-year rule. But four foreign journalists were missing in Afghanistan and feared dead after gunmen ambushed their convoy.

Working on the critical issue of stabilizing the tribally fractured country, negotiators reported progress in persuading Afghanistan’s major ethnic groups to work together on forming a government. No date or place for talks has been announced, but a Pakistani diplomatic source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a meeting would begin Saturday, possibly in Berlin.

The United Nations is urging Afghanistan’s ethnic groups to attend that meeting, U.N. officials and diplomats said in New York late Monday.

Northern 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.

More U.S. commandos joined the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other terrorist suspects in southern Afghanistan, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said. Several hundred members of special forces units already were on the ground, and U.S. officials reminded local tribesmen of the $25 million reward for finding bin Laden.

The war, meanwhile, raged on. U.S. bombing moved closer to the encircled city of Kunduz, and alliance artillery joined in what appeared to be the heaviest attacks at the front in days.

Alliance commanders continued to negotiate a surrender using two-way radios. But refugees who reached alliance lines recounted a defiant message from the foreign Muslims fighting in the city: "We are going to be martyrs. We are not leaving Kunduz."

Refugees said the foreigners — mostly Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens — were preventing Afghan Taliban fighters from surrendering. Refugees have reported that several hundred would-be Taliban defectors were shot by their own side.

In eastern Afghanistan, four journalists were traveling from Jalalabad to Kabul when six armed men dragged them from their cars and fired on them, witnesses said. Later, motorists told a local commander they had seen the bodies of three men and a woman lying by the road.

The four were two Reuters journalists — Australian television cameraman Harry Burton and Azizullah Haidari, an Afghan-born photographer — together with Julio Fuentes of the Spanish daily El Mundo and Maria Grazia Cutuli of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, their news organizations said.

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