GENERAL DOSTOM OFFERS TALEBAN IN KONDOOZ "SAFE PASSAGE" IF SURRENDER
KABOL 19 Nov. (IPS) Northern Alliance veteran warlord Abdol Rashid Dostom
announced Monday that negotiations are underway with Taleban leaders in the
northern city of Kondooz for their "peaceful surrender" amid reports
that some fighters have committed suicide rather than give up.
Mr. Dostom, an Uzbek, made the announcement Sunday as other Taleban commanders as well as the city’s Governor, Haji Omar Khan said they are willing to surrender to the United Nations, according to Afghan tribal elders in the Pakistan city of Peshawar.
A statement from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's office said he was "very concerned about the situation" and has been in touch with his special representative, Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi, who has contacted the International Committee for the Red Cross, which normally handles surrender situations, a U.N. spokesperson said.
Speaking from Mazar Sharif to the Persian and Poshtoon service of the BBC, Mr. Dostom said the Alliance has promised Taleban troops "safe passage from Kondooz to anywhere" if they gave up their weapons.
Mr. Dostom, a former Governor of Mazar Sharif captured the strategic city from the Taleban last Saturday.
He said he expected the talks to continue for another day or two, but warned that if the Taleban refused, then he would attack the besieged city.
He estimated the number of the defending Taleban at "some 10.000 men", including an undetermined number of Chechen, Pakistani, Arab and other volunteers, promising that they would be treated according to "international conventions and humanitarian considerations".
But Taleban commander Dadollah and Governor said Khan said they would not surrender to the Northern Alliance because, they said, the Alliance has no respect for human rights, property and honor.
"We shall continue to fight to the last man if the alliance enters the city", Dadollah said, adding that he and his men were willing to give up their heavy weapons and all non-Afghan fighters to the United Nations and called for the international body to appoint a neutral caretaker and a Governor for Kondooz.
The two men also said they support the proposed Loya Jirga, or the traditional council of Elders and the former Afghan King Mohammad Zaher Shah, who is also backed by the United Nations as an interim caretaker in the war-shattered Afghanistan.
As US bombers continued Sunday to bomb Taleban’s position both in Kondooz and in south-eastern city of Qandahar, where the situation remains confusing, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged Sunday morning in Washington that the strikes would continue near Kondooz and other areas of Afghanistan.
"This war is not over," Powell told Fox News on Sunday. "It'll continue for a while until the Taleban power is totally cracked and other tribes in the south start to reassert control".
"We shall continue to fight the enemy, the heretic Americans, British and French miscreants to the last man, until, God willing, we throw them out of our Muslim land", Mollah Hasan Rohani, a Taleban tribal leader in Qandahar told the BBC, adding that the Taleban controls four provinces in the south.
Asked about the whereabouts of Taleban’s supreme leader, he said Mollah Mohammad Omar was in Qandahar and in good shape.
Asked why the Taleban have not obeyed Omar’s reported orders to evacuate Qandahar, he said the reports were not true.
But Mr. Hamed Karzai, a pro-Zaher Shah Posthoon commander who is near Qandahar working for the peaceful surrender of the city said most of the south of Afghanistan are in the hands of local Taleban commanders who might accept peaceful surrender.
"I don’t know anything about Osama (Ben Laden). I don’t know if he is in Afghanistan or not, if he is dead or alive", he said in answer to a question about Mr. Ben Laden, whom the American consider as the mastermind behind the 11 September attacks on the United States, triggering Americans involvement in the wr-torn central Asian nation.
"The net is closing in on Osama Ben Laden", members of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan said on Sunday, suggesting that the hunt for the Saudi-born anti-Western crusader was "zeroing in" on an area to the east of Qandahar.
"I think he's still in Afghanistan. It's getting harder for him to hide as more and more territory is removed from Taleban control. "We are going to dig him out of his hole", Mr. Powell told US television.
Back in Kabol, UN’s Deputy-Special Envoy for Afghanistan Francesc Vendrell met Sunday with Borhaneddin Rabbani and other Northern Alliance leaders, discussing with them the formation of an interim broad-based caretaker government.
Mr. Rabbani, the "president" of the Islamic Government of Afghanistan, who returned to Kabol five years after he had been booted out by the Taleban welcomed UN’s initiatives for restoring peace and security to Afghanistan, but said nothing about the creation of an international peace keeping force, a proposal backed by the United Nations and the European Union but opposed by the Northern Alliance. ENDS AFQANESTAN SITUATION 191101