Taliban braces for last, bloody stand

BANGI, Afghanistan -- Her infant girl was only a month old. The trip was nine hours by foot. And anyone who tried it, warned the Taliban, would be killed.

But Tamana, 16, decided it was even riskier to remain in her home-town of Kunduz for what may be the last big battle in northern Afghanistan between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance.

In the midafternoon sun Friday, wrapped in a white burqa that matched her baby's white blanket, Tamana crossed the paved bridge that separates the territory controlled by the Taliban from that held by the alliance. She left behind a city where Taliban fighters are looting shuttered stores, American B-52 bombers and fighter planes are staging punishing airstrikes, and the likelihood of a bloodbath is growing ever greater.

By alliance estimates, thousands of Taliban fighters are holed up in Kunduz, the last population center in northern Afghanistan that remains in Taliban hands. The force is a fractious, volatile mix of Afghans with Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens and other foreigners who joined the radical Islamic militia. The foreigners, believed to be the Taliban's best fighters, have vowed to fight to the last man and already have killed some comrades who do not feel the same.

The Northern Alliance would like to take Kunduz the same way it captured many other towns in the past week: by guile, persuasion or bribery, not by brute force. Taliban commanders across the country have been talked into defecting rather than fighting in recent days, saving civilian lives and allowing their Afghan fighters to melt back into the countryside.

But that's not happening in Kunduz. Efforts to negotiate a surrender have collapsed. The Northern Alliance gave the Taliban 48 hours to give up or be attacked, a deadline that some officials said ends today. But alliance officials are predicting a slaughter.

Alliance commanders say the Afghans in the city can probably be persuaded to lay down their arms, but the foreigner fighters have not been offered any mercy. They can expect only imprisonment or death, alliance officials said.

As a result, the foreigners -- who make up perhaps one-third of the Taliban forces in Kunduz -- are vowing not only to fight to the death but to kill any comrades whose resolve seems to weaken. Alliance officials said that after they invited Afghan fighters in the Taliban's ranks to defect, the Taliban responded by publicly hanging five commanders as traitors.

The townspeople are meeting the same fate, according to alliance officials.

Shajoudin, a Northern Alliance commander guarding the bridge between Kunduz and Bangi, said the Taliban in Kunduz "have nowhere they can go" and will all be killed. He said his fighters awaited only an order to attack Taliban forces on the other side of the bridge and move on Kunduz.

Afghans on Friday marked the beginning of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting and prayer, but Shajoudin would not hold up the alliance. "We are fighting terrorists," and that, he said, supersedes even honored religious tradition.

Only three days ago, commanders like Shajoudin were not so self-assured. Taliban forces ambushed them on the bridge, killing 26, wounding 32 and taking 132 prisoners. Friday, green flags that mark where the soldiers died dot the hills that overlook the bridge.

After the ambush, the alliance bolstered its position with tanks and heavy artillery. Friday afternoon, Shajoudin's soldiers marched about 20 captured Taliban fighters toward Taloqan.

U.S. officials emphasize that conflict in northern Afghanistan is now isolated around Kunduz -- over a mountain ridge just west of the settlement of Bangi and 35 miles west of Taloqan, the alliance's new northern headquarters -- and that much of the region is returning to normal.

In Taloqan, captured by Northern Alliance forces Sunday, the streets are full of donkeys, carts and horses. Customers crowd the tea stalls and the market. Farmers are plowing at least some of the nearby fields. There is no curfew.

The town's population seems solidly behind the alliance forces.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright