Rebel march on Kunduz ends in confusion, chaos

BANGI, Afghanistan -- The scene was set for Northern Alliance troops to make another triumphant entrance into a city taken from the Taliban. Then everything went wrong.

Early Tuesday afternoon, the word spread that a Taliban commander in Kunduz, in northeastern Afghanistan, had switched his allegiance to the Northern Alliance and invited its troops to enter.

"Kunduz has been captured!" the Northern Alliance soldiers roared, and the tanks and troop carriers started their engines and rumbled toward the city.

But when the alliance's troops approached the fringes of Kunduz, they were met not with cheering crowds but with Taliban rockets. The soldiers, stunned, began to panic. So did the alliance commander, Gen. Daoud Khan, who stood on top of a hill, jerking his head about in confusion.

"I don't know what is happening," the commander said, his face drained of color. "We made contacts with commanders in the city. They told us they would embrace us."

With that, Khan, one of the senior military leaders of the alliance, scampered down the hill, jumped into his car and sped away from the front lines. Taking his cue, hundreds of soldiers followed, falling down, falling under car wheels, yelling and shouting, trampling each other in a panic to get away.

"Let me on, let me on!" soldiers yelled, leaping onto car hoods and troop carriers as they ran from what appeared to be a Taliban ambush and counteroffensive. Some men were run over in the chaos. The drivers of troops carriers, desperate to get away, left their men behind. The retreat stretched more than a mile and was halted only when an alliance soldier threatened to shoot anyone who went any further.

The Taliban assault never came. But their defiant defense of Kunduz, even as their comrades across Afghanistan have been left reeling, suggests that the battle-hardened army, even if mortally wounded, has some life in it yet.

By late afternoon here, the alliance had gathered itself again, and its soldiers were marching back toward Kunduz. Fresh troops came as well, more than 2,000 of them, most of them confidant that the Taliban's final days are ticking away.

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