Anti-Taliban Forces Close In on Kandahar

An anti-Taliban force in southern Afghanistan said it captured a strategic peak near Kandahar’s airport without a fight Friday as preparations began for an assault on the city, the last stronghold of the besieged regime.

Khalid Pushtoon, an aide to ethnic Pushtun commander Gul Agha Shirzai, said about 200 fighters loyal to Shirzai took control of a piece of high ground called Jeg Mary about eight miles west of the airport early Friday. He said the group seized an array of Taliban weaponry, including five tanks and an antiaircraft gun.

A Taliban force of about 80 soldiers gave up without a fight, he said.

“They laid down their arms and surrendered to us,” Pushtoon said by satellite telephone from the anti-Taliban force’s main staging point in Takhtehpol, about 25 miles southeast of Kandahar. Like Shirzai’s fighters, the Taliban is predominantly Pushtun, and the anti-Taliban forces have hoped to avoid a major battle with their ethnic brethren.

An undetermined number of Afghan Taliban soldiers, along with Arab and other foreign fighters, are believed to be in Kandahar, prepared to defend the Taliban’s spiritual capital.

Pushtoon said his force had deployed about 2,500 fighters southwest of the city--the airport is due south--but gave no indication that the advance on Kandahar was imminent. Another Pushtun force reportedly was approaching from the northwest.

“Pretty soon you will hear we are advancing on Kandahar,” he said. “When we are ready, we will make our way north slowly, and in a week or 10 days, we’ll have the city.”

Capture of the high ground near Kandahar would ease access to the city for a contingent of U.S. Marines who have set up a base about 50 miles southwest of Kandahar.

Reports of the advance by anti-Taliban forces came amid claims by the Northern Alliance, which has seized much of Afghanistan, that elements of its forces had arrived on Kandahar’s northern outskirts and engaged Taliban fighters there in initial skirmishes.

Neither Pushtoon’s account nor the Northern Alliance claims could be independently confirmed, and there was some speculation that the alliance claim could have been driven by a desire to increase its standing at political talks among Afghan factions underway in Germany.

Neither Shirzai’s group nor a Pushtun force northwest of Kandahar, led by Hamid Karzai, seemed enthusiastic about reports of Northern Alliance units operating in the Pushtun-dominated south. The alliance, which holds northern and western Afghanistan, including the capital, Kabul, is dominated by ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras who have virtually no communities in the south.

A natural wariness has long existed between Afghanistan’s dominant Pushtuns and its many minority ethnic groups of northern origins. A legacy of massacres and the destruction of Kabul during the alliance’s brief rule of Afghanistan in the early 1990s have only deepened Pushtun mistrust of these groups.

Both anti-Taliban groups operating near Kandahar made it known that they don’t want the Northern Alliance involved.

“We have enough fighters to take care of [the capture of Kandahar] by ourselves,” said Karzai’s brother, Ahmed, who lives in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

Pushtoon was more emphatic: “It would be a big mistake on their part. Four thousand [fighters] are enough for Kandahar,” he said. “We don’t need their help.”

The Shirzai spokesman said his forces were counting on assistance from U.S. troops during their final push into the city.

“We haven’t had any help so far [from the Americans], but we’re expecting it,” Pushtoon said. He declined to elaborate.

Heavy U.S. Bombing of City Is Reported

Travelers arriving in the Pakistani border town of Chaman from Kandahar on Friday said the Afghan city underwent heavy bombardment by U.S. aircraft during the night. On Friday morning, two B-52 bombers were seen flying in large, lazy circles over the area.

At the Pentagon on Friday, defense officials described the situation in Kandahar as fluid and said information was sketchy.

“We do know what we can see, which is from the teams we have on the ground with the opposition forces, and they are able to provide air support to those opposition forces,” Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a briefing. “We do not know what we cannot see, which is how many actual fighters there are inside the city.

“There has not yet been a major ground offensive battle. There are, we know, negotiations going on between the opposition forces and the Taliban leadership for surrender.”

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said at the same briefing: “I would add one thing with respect to Kandahar. There’s been some speculation in the press that [Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed] Omar conceivably could be attempting to find some way to negotiate a surrender of the city--or I see speculation to that effect--with somebody.

“I can assure you that the United States would vigorously oppose any idea of providing him amnesty or safe passage of any type.”

Taliban Forces Said to Be Ready to Surrender

Shirzai, the Pushtun commander, confirmed that his group had made contact with members of the Taliban inside the city in an attempt to negotiate a peaceful transfer of power to a tribal council. He claimed that a majority of Taliban forces were prepared to surrender but were being prevented by Arab and other foreign fighters from giving up.

“Only the Arabs in the city are ready to fight and die, and only a few Taliban support them,” Shirzai said. “We are trying to convince them to surrender.”

Shirzai is a former governor of Kandahar province and a well-known anti-Soviet resistance commander during the 1980s. If the Taliban refuses to surrender, his forces and those of Karzai are believed to be planning a coordinated attack on the city.

Karzai is said to have about 1,500 fighters advancing toward Kandahar from the northwest.

“We are trying to go forward to Kandahar,” Shirzai said on the British Broadcasting Corp.’s Pashto-language service.

As anti-Taliban forces gathered for what they hoped would be a final push into Kandahar, negotiations between the Taliban and tribal leaders continued for the surrender of the important southern border town of Spin Buldak. Local Taliban officials reportedly had been ready to hand over power to tribal elders this week, but the elders fell out over the issue of representation on a proposed council.

Those differences apparently gave Taliban leaders in Kandahar a chance to regain their grip on Spin Buldak, at least temporarily. On Thursday, Omar conveyed a message about the importance of keeping control in the region.

As in Kandahar, Arab fighters in the town were also said to reject a negotiated hand-over.

Meanwhile, U.S. forces continued their search for Osama bin Laden and members of his Al Qaeda terrorist network. Vice President Dick Cheney said Friday that Bin Laden is believed to be in the vicinity of Tora Bora, a mountainous enclave near the eastern city of Jalalabad crisscrossed by treacherous trails and riddled with caves.

“I think he’s probably in that general area,” Cheney said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “He was equipped to go to ground there. He’s got what he believes to be fairly secure facilities, caves underground. It’s an area he’s familiar with. He operated there back during the war against the Soviets in the ‘80s. He’s got a large number of fighters with him probably.”

Cheney said U.S. forces have already bombed the mouths of many of those caves and have an “active campaign underway” to take out Al Qaeda’s underground facilities. But he also said that “there have been times, I’m convinced, where he hasn’t been in the caves, where he’s stayed in homes. He’s moved around. . . . If we knew precisely where he was, we’d go get him.”

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Times staff writers Alissa J. Rubin in Chaman and Richard T. Cooper in Washington contributed to this report.