Posted on 11/24/2001 12:48:55 AM PST by JohnHuang2
BANGI, Afghanistan, Nov 24, 2001 (AP WorldStream via COMTEX) -- Six hundred foreign fighters believed loyal to Osama bin Laden handed over their weapons to anti-Taliban forces Saturday, the northern alliance said as it marched on the besieged city of Kunduz.An alliance commander characterized the handover as the beginning of a wholesale surrender of the defenders of Kunduz, but fears remained that other foreign fighters inside the city would choose to fight to the death rather than turn themselves in.
"The 600 foreign fighters, who are Chechens, Arabs, and some Pakistanis, surrendered with their weapons," said Amanullah Khan, a northern alliance spokesman.
An alliance commander on the other side of the city, Gen. Daoud Khan, said more surrenders were expected. "It has just started. Maybe another 700 more will be handed over. We should have all these prisoners handed over in next day or two days."
The surrender took place in the village of Qalai Qul Mohammed, west of Kunduz, where the foreign fighters were surrounded after breaking through alliance front lines, alliance commanders said.
The surrendering fighters were taken to the nearby city of Mazar-e-Sharif by forces of the three main generals in northern Afghanistan: Rashid Dostum, Atta Mohammed and Mohammed Mohaqik.
More foreign fighters were believed holed up in Kunduz itself, which alliance forces vowed to take after 12 days in which the front lines changed little.
"Maybe tonight or tomorrow we will enter into Kunduz," Gen. Khan said on Kunduz's eastern front line.
The Taliban governor trapped in the city - whose name, like the Taliban supreme leader, is Mohammed Omar - said his fighters would walk out "peacefully and unarmed."
Speaking by satellite telephone from inside Kunduz, he told Britain's Channel 4 television: "The Taliban brothers who are from other provinces of Afghanistan, they have a way out."
But it was unclear whether he spoke for the foreign fighters as well, who have no such guarantees for free passage out of Kunduz.
Under a deal negotiated between the alliance and the Taliban in recent days, the foreign fighters are to be put in detention camps pending an investigation into their links to bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network.
Gen. Khan said the foreigners would be tried in "Islamic courts" in Afghanistan.
But many feared the alliance fighters, whose hatred of the foreigner fighters is intense, would slaughter them rather than send them to trial.
An American official in Washington said some of the fighters in the besieged city may be deputies and lieutenants to bin Laden, the chief suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks which sparked the U.S.-led attacks on the Taliban.
It had been feared that those inside Kunduz would choose to fight to the death.
Ordering a commander to march on Kunduz on Saturday morning, Gen. Khan said: "Bring up the tanks and troops to go into Kunduz. If the foreigners fight you, fight."
At the United Nations, officials announced a one-day delay in a conference in Germany aimed at paving the way for a new Afghan government following the Taliban's collapse. The meeting will now open Tuesday because of delays in getting participants to the venue in Bonn, U.N. spokesman Ahmad Fawzi said.
In the days before the surrender began, Gen. Khan said, he believed Pakistani fighters were fleeing by plane out of the city's half-destroyed airport, although a spokesman for the U.S. military said there was nothing to indicate any such evacuation.
"We control the skies over Afghanistan and we would not let anyone fly out and take people who we have repeatedly said wouldn't be allowed to leave," Marine Corps Lt. Col. David Lapan said in Washington.
Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has repeatedly appealed for measures to save Pakistani fighters who joined the Taliban side, fearing they face slaughter if the northern alliance seizes the city.
A militant Islamic group in Pakistan, which claims to have sent thousands of Pakistanis to fight alongside the Taliban, threatened to target Afghan refugees in Pakistan if its supporters are executed in Kunduz.
"People are angry and will target Afghan refugees belonging to northern alliance areas if our people are executed or treated unfairly," said Maulvi Mohammed Khalid Khan, one of the group's leaders.
Alliance troops had already been moving incrementally toward Kunduz. Gen. Khan said his fighters moved Friday into the Taliban-held town of Aliabad, just south of Kunduz, where militia fighters gave up without a fight. A U.S. official also reported fighting near the town of Khanabad, just to the east.
Fighting also continued further south near Kabul in the village of Maidan Shahr, where alliance fighters have been attacking Taliban holdouts in the rocky, barren hills.
And in the area outside the eastern city of Jalalabad, where bin Laden was spotted just before the U.S.-led bombing began and could still be hiding in caves, U.S. bombs continued to fall overnight and early Saturday.
A U.S. official reported Friday that the northern alliance might be making its move toward the Taliban's last remaining area of control, in the south.
Advance elements of an alliance force have entered Helmand province, just to the west of the Taliban base of Kandahar, the official said.
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER Associated Press Writer
Copyright 2001 Associated Press, All rights reserved
I keep hearing this theme. I think the truth is that only the media is afraid of the slaughter.
Hiding behind the skirts of women, again! This militant Muslims are really so manly and peace loving! ;-)
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