Taliban to surrender Kunduz

BANGI (Afghanistan), NOV. 22. The Taliban agreed Thursday to surrender its last northern stronghold, including thousands of Arabs and other foreign fighters loyal to Osama bin Laden, Northern Alliance commanders said. However, details about how the foreigners will be treated remain to be settled.

Fighting erupted along the front line near the Taliban stronghold, Kunduz, even as the agreement to surrender the city was announced. However, Alliance officials blamed the fighting on communications problems and insisted the deal had not fallen through.

A senior Alliance commander, Atta Mohammed, said the surrender agreement came late Thursday afternoon in a meeting with top Taliban commanders, including the Deputy Defence Minister, Mullah Fazil.

Ashraf Nadeem, a spokesman for Mohammed, said the Alliance would send 5,000 fighters to Kunduz ``possibly on Saturday'' to oversee the surrender. The fate of foreign fighters with the Taliban in Kunduz remained to be worked out in talks set for Friday in Mazar-e-Sharif. The Taliban had agreed to surrender the foreigners - mostly Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens - but wanted guarantees about their treatment. The issue had been the main obstacle to a surrender deal for days as the foreigners feared they would be killed. The U.S. is pressuring the Alliance against accepting any deal which might allow them to escape.

Mohammed Daoud, a senior Northern Alliance commander, said the fighting broke out on Thursday when the Taliban forces - not knowing about the surrender agreement - tried to prevent about 200 of their fighters from surrendering east of Kunduz.

In Islamabad, Gen. Musharraf urged the Red Cross to do all it can to prevent massacre of foreign fighters at the hands of the Afghans.

A surrender in Kunduz would leave only one major city - the southern base of Kandahar - in Taliban hands. Its spokesman, Syed Tayyab Agha, vowed that the Taliban would fight to defend Kandahar and the surrounding provinces they still control.

However, according to the Al-Jazeera satellite TV channel, the Taliban denied that its fighters in Kunduz had agreed to surrender. It said the ``office of Mullah Omar strongly denied that and the Taliban army chief, Akhdar Othmani, said the information was totally false.''

Meanwhile, Northern Alliance forces launched an offensive on Khanabad, about 20 km east of Kunduz. Taliban troops defending Kandahar have come under heavy fire from U.S. air raids and ambushes by local tribesmen, Hamid Karzai, a supporter of the former Afghan King, Zahir Shah, said.

- AP, AFP, Reuters

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