SAYED SALAHUDDIN, Kabul | Wednesday
THOUSANDS of angry Afghans stormed and set fire to the long-deserted US embassy in the capital, Kabul, as part of huge protests against threatened US strikes.
Two Taliban fighters climbed on to the building and used a hammer and an iron rod to rip off the US seal from over the main door to the old office of the ambassador.
All US diplomats and staff left the embassy just before the Soviet Union abandoned its occupation of Afghanistan in 1989 and the United States has maintained only a skeleton local staff and has no diplomatic ties with the isolated purist Taliban rulers of Afghanistan.
”Death to Bush,” shouted tens of thousands of protesters, mostly government officials and students, who marched through the city to protest against US demands that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden, chief suspect in this month’s devastating suicide plane attacks.
”We will support Islam and bin Laden,” they chanted.
The protesters burnt an effigy of President George W Bush, ripped apart a US flag and hurled stones at the gates and offices of the embassy before setting it alight.
Several marchers and Taliban fighters were injured by stones.
”The US government should learn a lesson from our defeat of the Russians and the British,” they shouted.
”Others like them and their embassy, they will be trampled under the feet of Muslims and Afghans,” one protester said.
A huge plume of smoke spiralled into the sky above the compound and Taliban fighters tried to disperse the crowd.
Fire fighters fought in vain to extinguish the flames, which were spreading from a car park filled with dilapidated vehicles stored in disused garages.
Local staff of the embassy had already evacuated the compound. Meanwhile, the leader of the Taliban has turned to the American people, appealing for common sense in assessing whether his guest, the world’s most wanted man Osama bin Laden, masterminded this month’s suicide plane attacks.
Tens of thousands of Afghans are fleeing toward the borders of their landlocked country, fearing a US military strike in the hunt for bin Laden. The ruling Taliban was left with but a single ally on Wednesday, its neighbour Pakistan, after Saudi Arabia – the birthplace of Islam — cut off all ties with the puritanical Muslim movement.
Under siege from the rest of the world, and under attack from within, the Taliban has responded defiantly by insisting that anyone helping the United States punish them for protecting the Saudi-born dissident bin Laden faced the wrath of their holy warriors.
The leader of the purist movement, the one-eyed Mullah Mohammad Omar, appealed to Americans late on Tuesday to use their own judgment in responding to last week’s devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon rather than blindly following their government’s policy to attack his country.
”You accept everything your government says, whether it is true or false,” Omar said in a messaged faxed to Reuters from his headquarters in the southern city of Kandahar.
Mullah Omar faces a delicate balancing act since the rising military threat could stir questions in Taliban ranks, especially about the wisdom of continuing to protect bin Laden and his al Qaeda organisation from US demands for their destruction.
Bin Laden brought money, manpower, expertise and access to the rest of the Muslim world; now he may bring the destruction of the Taliban.
”Don’t you have your own thinking? Can Osama bin Laden carry out such an act in America?” Omar asked in his appeal.
”So it will be better for you to use your sense and understanding.”
But the Taliban have announced plans for war, ordering a mobilisation of more than 300 000 men and seizing food supplies from a United Nations warehouse intended for victims of a crippling drought that has exacerbated the country’s woes.
Saudi Arabia’s links with the Taliban have long been cool, but the formal severing of ties means Pakistan is now the only country to recognise the Afghan administration – although Islamabad withdrew its diplomats on security grounds on Monday.
The move by Saudi Arabia has undermined the Taliban’s attempts to pitch its crisis as a battle between the United States and the Islamic world.
Pakistan said it would retain ties to provide a window for the Taliban to the outside world.
”I think we should maintain contact, at least there should be one country who ought to be able to have an access to them, to be able to engage them,” President Pervez Musharraf said on Tuesday.
And as they found themselves virtually friendless, the Taliban also faced a small but emboldened opposition that has stepped up attacks from their northern strongholds.
The Taliban, fighting a civil war in the north for years, admitted losing Zari, 100 km south of Mazar-i-Sharif, to Northern Alliance forces advancing on the strategic city this week.
Further resistance came from Ismail Khan, the opposition commander who was once governor of Herat, who said he was rallying up to 7 000 men to win back the western Afghan city from the Taliban.
He said Taliban forces were badly equipped and crumbling under the threat of all-out war. The report could no be verified.
The country itself may also be in the process of being deserted, with the UN’s refugee agency saying they were preparing to receive 1,5-million refugees in the event of US strikes — most in Pakistan, but tens of thousands also in Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
Mullah Omar has warned Washington it could not win its ”war on terrorism” by killing bin Laden and urged it to change its Middle East policies or face a ”vain and bloody war”.
But still missing, the Taliban has said, is the world’s most wanted man.
The Taliban say they are trying to hand their long-time ”guest” the verdict of clerics who demanded last week that he leave of his own free will and in his own time.
The chief Taliban representative has insisted the leadership would not hand over bin Laden — even if they could find him — unless the United States provides evidence to back up the claim that he masterminded the September 11 attacks on Washington and New York. – Reuters