AFGHANISTAN – The Taliban and its supreme leader were reported Friday to have decided to leave its stronghold in Kandahar within 24 hours, turning over power to local leaders. Senior Pentagon officials said they did not believe the report, however, and were proceeding with their operations. The Pentagon said the Taliban had lost control of two-thirds of Afghanistan and that it believed a U.S. airstrike this week had killed Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command.
Kandahar been under regular attack by U.S. warplanes, and local tribal leaders said Thursday that they would demand that the Taliban and their leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, leave the city in southern Afghanistan. The Pakistan-based agency Afghan Islamic Press reported Friday that Omar agreed to head for the mountains following discussions with “close friends and army commanders.”
Under the deal, control of the city would pass to Mullah Naqibullah and Haji Basher, two former commanders of Afghan resistance forces in the 1980s war against Soviet occupation. They are ethnic Pashtuns, members of Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, as are most of the Taliban. Bashar is close to Yunus Khalis, a Pashtun leader who took over the northeastern city of Jalalabad earlier this week. Much of the rest of Afghanistan has been taken over by the opposition Northern Alliance, a loose affiliation of largely ethnic Tajik and Uzbek groups.
Senior U.S. officials said that they had no indication that the report of the Taliban quitting Kandahar was true, and Navy Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the daily Pentagon news briefing that “I do not believe it.”
In the United States, meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said reports that Mohammed Atef , bin Laden’s deputy, had been killed “seem authoritative.” Atef appeared to have been killed in a bombing raid near Kabul earlier this week. The reports have not been confirmed, however, because Atef’s body has not been found.
Stufflebeem said the death of Atef, if the reports are true, “will help our future operations” but would have “no impact on operations that have already been planned.”
Rumsfeld said U.S. soldiers had been exchanging fire and even killing those Taliban and al-Qaida forces who would not surrender. He told reporters that “hundreds” of U.S. soldiers are “armed and they’re participating” in skirmishes, particularly in southern Afghanistan. “They’re killing Taliban that won’t surrender and al-Qaida that are trying to move from one place to another. They have gone into places and met resistance and dealt with it.”
Rumsfeld also said high-level Taliban leaders had been captured by opposition Afghan forces and American officials are planning to interrogate them. Asked how senior the leaders were, he said, “They were not privates, some of them.”
