Islamabad | Thursday
PROVINCES have fallen like dominoes against Afghanistan’s former Taliban rulers, cornering the Islamic militia into a small southern corner from where their future looks decidedly uncertain.
Routed in northern Afghanistan, chased out of the capital Kabul, the Taliban may now only have control of three or four of the war-stricken country’s 31 provinces, according to some diplomats monitoring the conflict.
Most of northern Afghanistan is now in the hands of the Northern alliance, the new masters of Kabul, which made spectacular gains in a three-day drive through frontlines they had been stuck behind for months.
Most southern provinces have returned to local militia commanders with no love for the alliance nor the Taliban.
Taliban territory is shrinking with each communiqu given by representative for the Northern Alliance — a fractious group of mujahedin factions, many of whose leaders were chased out of Kabul by the Taliban in 1996.
By late Wednesday, the alliance had a swathe of territory with a southern border that ran from the Afghan capital in the east through Bamiyan, the province now notorious for the giant stone Buddhas that the Taliban blew up this year, to Herat in the west.
In the southern half of the country, ethnic Pashtun tribes and local mujahedin commanders have leaped upon the anti-Taliban bandwagon to boot out the hardline militia.
Throughout their five-year rule over the bulk of the country, the Taliban had quarrelled with tribes over issues such as a ban on music at traditional marriage ceremonies.
The Taliban has said it has conducted a “strategic withdrawal” to the south to avoid civilian casualties.
Experts say it is impossible to say where the militia and its Arab and Pakistani “jihad” (holy war) volunteers will end up.
The Taliban insisted on Wednesday that it was in control of Kandahar, the headquarters of its supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and sometime home to Omar’s “guest” Osama bin Laden, the accused terrorist leader.
No-one knows where bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, or Omar are.
But US officials said there were reports of fighting by Pashtun tribes around Kandahar city. The Northern Alliance said there was a “popular uprising” in the Taliban bastion.
But the bulk of the east and southeast of the country, the traditional Taliban heartland, is now in the hands of local warlords, many of whom played key roles in the battle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.
Rather than regrouping for a last stand in Kandahar, analysts said Afghan Taliban fighters now seem to be hiding their distinctive black turbans so they can go back to their home regions, leaving foreign volunteers surrounded and in desperate condition in zones in the east and the northern city of Kunduz.
Any troop concentration would become a target for US warplanes that have been hitting Taliban targets since October 7.
Diplomatic sources said Taliban fighters were disbanding or discreetly regrouping in the mountains to conduct a guerrilla campaign against the Northern Alliance.
Omar reportedly gave a radio speech on Monday ordering his men to stand and fight, calling those who quit “chickens with their heads cut off which will eventually die and fall in a ditch.” – Sapa-AFP
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