LUKE HARDING near Mazar-i-Sharif, NICHOLAS WATT, BRIAN WHITAKER and agencies | Friday
MULLAH Faizal, the most senior Taliban leader left in northern Afghanistan, swept out of the beleaguered city of Kunduz on Wednesday night in a convoy of mud-encrusted battle cruisers crammed with 50 heavily armed Taliban fighters.
He arrived at 10pm for talks with General Abdul Rashid Dostam of the Northern Alliance in his baronial castle, the Qila-e-Jhangi (Fort of War), on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif.
About 40 Taliban guards armed with machine guns and Kalashnikovs were allowed inside the mud-walled fortress as negotiations continued late into the night. A second contingent of Taliban fighters who had travelled out of Kunduz in darkness waited outside as Dostam’s Uzbek militia patrolled the balcony.
Faizal was escorted into a carpeted upstairs room. His second-in-command, the ruthless Mullah Dadullah, stayed in Kunduz because he was sick, aides said. Other Taliban commanders who had recently defected to the Northern Alliance turned up, followed by Dostam.
By 2am both sides were claiming they had a deal. The thousands of Taliban troops besieged in their last enclave in northern Afghanistan would apparently surrender.
Dostam went even further: the Taliban, he said optimistically, were now preparing to surrender in southern Afghanistan as well. ”The fighting of the Taliban is finished in Afghanistan, even in Kandahar,” he said. ”They are preparing to surrender to us.”
The two Taliban commanders in Kunduz are both from the regime’s southern heartland. Faizal, who holds the post of assistant defence minister, is from Kandahar while Dadullah is from Oruzgan, where the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, grew up.
During the past week several prominent Taliban generals on the Kunduz front have defected to the Northern Alliance, taking their troops with them. At the opposition front line south of Kunduz, close to the village of Aliabad, most of the alliance fighters were Taliban until last week.
The local Taliban commander in the neighbouring town of Baghlan, Amir Gul, threw in his lot with the opposition and took 3 000 Taliban fighters with him. Increasingly, the battle for Kunduz is no longer between the alliance and the Taliban but between Afghans and their Arab ”guests”, who have vowed to fight to the death.
Outside the heavily fortified compound military helicopters clattered in the dark. American special forces have a large presence in Mazar-i-Sharif. It seems inconceivable that any deal on Kunduz would have been made without the Pentagon’s involvement.
”Nobody will be fighting in Kunduz,” Faizal insisted. ”The problem will be solved.” Asked whether the Arab fighters would hand over their Kalashnikovs, he replied: ”Why not? Yes. They will accept my word. Yes, we can give the message to the people that fighting will not happen.”
On Thursday it seemed the deal had held as Taliban soldiers began surrendering to the Northern Alliance. As US warplanes struck at al-Qaida positions around Kunduz, truckloads of retreating Taliban troops could be seen driving out of the city.
Northern Alliance troops began advancing toward the centre of the city, but it appeared that some determined Taliban troops were refusing to move from their positions.
Hard-line Taliban fighters at the Kunduz front – mostly believed to be foreigners who had come to Afghanistan to support the Taliban – launched their first mortar attack in days even as surrender talks persisted.
About 3 000 foreign Taliban of Arab, Chechen and Pakistani extraction are believed to be holed up in Kunduz.
Shells pounded a heavily trafficked frontline road out of Kunduz, sending refugee women running.
Many women, confused, dived into a ditch that was exposed to the incoming shelling. Others sought shelter inside a nearby mosque.
Northern Alliance commanders and officials gave conflicting accounts of the terms of any deals for the city’s surrender, saying variously that proposals on the table would allow Afghan Taliban among the Kunduz forces to join the alliance side or retreat to the southern base of Kandahar. Kandahar is the only other city still held by the Taliban.
”Things are confused, and every minute they are changing,” said Shah Jan, an aide to General Mohammed Daoud, a senior alliance commander who had been negotiating with the Taliban. ”They’re still negotiating,” he said, adding that Kunduz had ”not yet” surrendered.
Earlier Daoud said he would agree surrender terms for Afghans, but would not offer a deal to Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis.
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Shattered World: A Daily Mail & Guardian special on the attack on the US
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