U.S. air campaign focuses on Taliban stronghold

By Kathy Gannon

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan – U.S. warplanes zeroed in near the town of Kunduz today, where Taliban fighters and followers of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network were apparently set to make a stand at one of their last pockets of resistance in northern Afghanistan.

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, U.S. airstrikes on two buildings killed some senior Taliban and al-Qaida leaders, the Pentagon said today.

Victoria Clarke, spokeswoman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, told reporters that she had no numbers or identities of those killed in the strikes on buildings near the capital Kabul on Tuesday and the southern city of Kandahar on Wednesday. But she said there was no evidence that bin Laden was among them.

Meanwhile, ending a three-month drama that has overlapped with the standoff between the United States and bin Laden, eight international aid workers who had been accused of preaching Christianity in Afghanistan arrived in neighboring Pakistan after being plucked to safety by U.S. special forces helicopters early today.

“It’s like a miracle,” said Georg Taubmann, one of the freed workers. The group – two Americans, two Australians and four Germans, including Taubmann – was airlifted out of the town of Ghazni in central Afghanistan amid a chaotic anti-Taliban uprising.

Despite a series of stunning setbacks that cost the Islamic militia its grip on the capital and deprived it of huge swaths of territory, Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was defiant in a BBC interview broadcast today, saying he’d rather die than “join an evil government” with the country’s former leader.

The Taliban pullback from urban centers, he also said, was part of a larger strategy that aims to destroy America.

“If God’s help is with us, this will happen within a short period of time – keep in mind this prediction,” he said. “The real matter is the extinction of America, and God willing, it will fall to the ground.”

Omar also ruled out taking part in a multiethnic government like the one the United Nations has proposed for Afghanistan.

“The struggle for a broad-based government has been going on for the last 20 years, but nothing came of it,” he said. “We will not accept a government of wrongdoers. We prefer death than to be a part of an evil government.”

The BBC asked the questions through an intermediary over a satellite phone, who passed them on to the Taliban leader through a hand-held radio. Earlier today, the private Afghan Islamic Press agency reported that Omar was in a safe place and in charge of his troops.

In northern Afghanistan, anti-Taliban forces said they were preparing to launch an offensive against the front line outside Kunduz, the region’s only town of significant size remaining under Taliban control. It lies between the northern alliance-held cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Taloqan.

U.S. warplanes launched dozens of strikes against Taliban tank and troop positions in the area, refugees and witnesses said. According to refugees, thousands of foreign fighters – Arabs and Chechens – are concentrated near Kunduz.

Northern alliance commanders said they were trying by radio to get the Taliban to surrender, but Sayaf Baick, a northern alliance commander, said the foreign fighters had killed several local Taliban officials in Kunduz who wanted to give up the town.

Just who was in control of particular areas was difficult to pin down. The Taliban were reported to have left the eastern town of Jalalabad, but one Shiite Muslim northern alliance leader, Saeed Hussein Anwari, told The Associated Press in Kabul today that the city’s status was unclear.

Francesc Vendrell, the deputy U.N. special representative for Afghanistan, told Associated Press Television News that Jalalabad “is clearly not in Taliban hands, but it’s a little confusing to know in whose hands it is.”

At the Pakistan-Afghanistan border post of Torkham – the border crossing nearest to Jalalabad – Taliban guards have left.

Gul Wali, who described himself as the new security chief at the border post, said alliance faction leader Yunus Khalis and his supporters also had control of Jalalabad and surrounding Nangarhar province, and that there was no fighting.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press said American warplanes hammered areas around the Taliban’s stronghold of Kandahar, killing eight civilians and injuring 22. That claim could not be confirmed.

Vendrell said he had been told that there were northern alliance forces in Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace and spiritual home.

On the eastern border, Pashtun tribesmen once loyal to the Taliban were said to be rising up against them, and Taliban fighters were reportedly taking shelter in the mountains. Anwari said the border provinces of Paktika, Paktia and part of Logar were all in control of anti-Taliban Pashtun forces.

With the Taliban having fled Kabul, speculation has grown that Burhanuddin Rabbani, Afghanistan’s president from 1992-96 and titular head of the northern alliance, will return to the capital.

Anwari, the Shiite Muslim northern alliance commander, said Rabbani was remaining for the time being in the Panjshir Valley, a staging ground for the alliance during its long anti-Taliban campaign in the north, because of the alliance’s promise not to take power in the capital.

He warned, however, that if the United Nations and the world community fail to act soon to fill the power vacuum, the alliance would have to establish a government.

Meanwhile, U.S. special forces were watching key roads in southern Afghanistan, hunting for Taliban leaders, Rumsfeld said Wednesday. At the Pentagon, senior defense officials speaking on condition of anonymity said a new military plan was being prepared to hunt down bin Laden and other leaders of al-Qaida and the Taliban.

“One of our primary objectives over the last few days has been to go after command and control – Taliban and al-Qaida leadership,” Clarke, Rumsfeld’s spokeswoman, said today.

President Bush launched airstrikes against Afghanistan on Oct. 7 after the Taliban refused to surrender bin Laden, sought in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

As the Islamic holy month of Ramadan approached, authorities said there would be limited U.S. bombing of the caves and mountain redoubts where the Taliban and al-Qaida leaders were believed to be hiding.