Kunduz surrender complete as last 6,000 Taliban taken

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan -- Six thousand Taliban fighters surrendered late Monday and Tuesday, clearing out the last remaining pocket of the radical fundamentalist regime in northern Afghanistan.

Northern Alliance officials said the surrender took place at the village of Chahar Darreh, about 6 miles west of Kunduz, as they handed over tanks, artillery and other weapons to forces under the command of ethnic Uzbek warlord Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum.

The prisoners were transported to Dostum's stronghold of Mazar-e-Sharif, said Gen. Abdul Basir Khalid.

Gen. Abdul Najib, security chief for Kunduz province, said the Taliban fighters began surrendering around 7 p.m. local time Monday.

Significant numbers of the surrendered fighters are Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens, Uzbeks and other foreigners, some of whom are thought to have links to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network.

"They are all prisoners now," said Najib. "Right now, we are trying to separate the foreigners from the local Taliban."

Khalid said a surrender agreement brokered last week among the northern generals would allow Afghan Taliban fighters, but not foreigners, to proceed to Kandahar, the last redoubt of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The streets of Kunduz were quiet Tuesday, one day after Northern Alliance forces routed the last Taliban pockets of resistance in the city in a brief, fierce gun battle.

"There are no Taliban left in Kunduz, not even one person," said Khalid. "We have cleaned all of the Taliban out of Kunduz province."

"This is peace," city officials announced repeatedly in the central market square as they encouraged merchants to do their part to return calm.

On Tuesday, the market was buzzing with men but no women were in sight.

A jail in the village of Qurbragh, on the former eastern front between the towns of Taloqan and Kunduz, held many Taliban prisoners Tuesday. Visiting reporters were not allowed to speak with the prisoners.

Jailers said that other foreign soldiers taken prisoner had committed suicide in a trench during the fighting in Kunduz. The account could not be independently verified.

Files on previous prisoners in the jail attested to the Taliban's iron grip in the region.

One file noted that a prisoner had "listened to the radio three times despite warning." Another prisoner had left behind a letter saying he had been imprisoned because he "listened to music and the radio too often."

- Information from the Associated Press and Knight Ridder was used in this report.

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