Afghan Opposition Enters Kabul, Routs Taliban Across Nation’s North

Crowning four days of opposition victories, Northern Alliance forces entered this capital city without a fight today after thousands of Taliban troops defected or fled.

Alliance soldiers overtook the Taliban army garrison in Kabul at 4 a.m., an opposition commander said. About five hours later, the deputy commander of the alliance, Bismullah Khan, drove toward the city center with other senior commanders, and a convoy of pickup trucks and jeeps packed with cheering fighters and antiaircraft guns awaited orders to follow.

Several thousand Northern Alliance soldiers began to pour into the city at 11:20 a.m. on foot and riding tanks, trucks and armored personnel carriers, after Younis Qanooni, the Northern Alliance’s interior minister, and Gen. Mohammed Qassim Fahim, the alliance’s top commander, arrived to give the order.

A civilian resident of Kabul, who identified himself only as Wase, said fighters who had reached the heart of the city held aloft pictures of Ahmed Shah Masoud, the revered commander who was assassinated by the Taliban just days before the Sept. 11 terror attacks on America.

Crowds lined the streets to watch the troops enter the city, and many cheered. One woman raised her burka, the head-to-foot veil that all women were forced to wear under Taliban rule. A day earlier, she would have been badly beaten, but now she was free to show her face in the streets.

The corpses of seven men lay strewn across a park in the city. Bystanders said they were Taliban soldiers killed by Northern Alliance troops for resisting.

One of the men lay under a basketball net, his head in a pool of blood. A single cartridge and a set of keys were beside his right ear. A broken stick was in his right hand, and two burnt cigarettes were still in his mouth.

At a prison where the Taliban kept hundreds of political prisoners, the cells were empty, said Babajan Tahsili, 45, head of the department of security. “When we arrived this morning, the prisoners and Taliban were all gone,” he said. The Taliban did not take the prisoners with them.

“Everyone went home,” Tahsili said.

As the Taliban left, it did take along eight jailed foreign aid workers, including two Americans, accused of spreading Christianity in Muslim Afghanistan, witnesses told Associated Press.

Tahsili described his cooperation with the Northern Alliance and that of his people as “extraordinary--no problem.” Next to him at the prison gate stood a uniformed Northern Alliance soldier who was helping to maintain security.

“It is our responsibility, and we are cooperating,” Tahsili said. “We have taken our own security measures, so the building won’t be looted.”

The march into Kabul followed four days of fighting during which the Northern Alliance appeared to take half of Afghanistan. As of late last week, it had held about 10% of the country.

On Monday, alliance forces had pushed westward all the way to the Iranian border and also encircled the northern city of Kunduz, a strongly pro-Taliban area, alliance officials said. Meanwhile, news reached Peshawar in Pakistan early today that the Afghan city of Jalalabad, east of Kabul, had fallen to forces allied with the Northern Alliance.

Around Kabul, opposition forces fired a barrage of artillery and rockets Monday after intense U.S. B-52 strikes blasted huge holes in the Taliban’s front lines.

Several enormous bomb craters, and the corpses of five Taliban soldiers, were visible on the road into Kabul today. In the town of Mashinab, a front-line Taliban village, three craters, each about 30 feet across, provided just a hint of how intense the previous day’s airstrikes had been.

Taliban soldiers began withdrawing from Kabul on Monday, heading south toward the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, said the alliance’s foreign minister, Abdullah. According to at least one report, U.S. fighter jets strafed them as they fled.

Gen. Mohammed Almas, one of the Northern Alliance’s senior front-line commanders, said the defection of more than 2,000 Taliban troops on the Kabul front “was the reason the Taliban were defeated.”

“I think it is great news. It means the initial phase of the campaign is going well,” Army Secretary Thomas E. White said on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

White said he thought “a combination of well-targeted air power along with movement on the ground by Northern Alliance forces” prompted the Taliban to flee Kabul.

Sean McCormack, a White House spokesman, said: “We’ve seen the reports and we’re evaluating the reports. The situation on the ground is very fluid.”

There were unsubstantiated reports early today that the airport outside Kandahar had also fallen to the alliance.

On Monday, Pentagon officials had acknowledged that alliance advances were encouraging but stressed that a Taliban counter-attack could still wipe out some of the gains.

The United States had earlier advised the alliance not to seize the capital until a plan for a post-Taliban government was laid out. In New York, representatives of Afghanistan’s six neighbors, plus the United States and Russia, met Monday to try to devise such a plan.

Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a senior Pentagon spokesman, declined comment on whether the fall of Kabul would create diplomatic problems for the U.S. administration.

“I just hope it’s correct,” he said.

The regions of Afghanistan still under Taliban control, largely in the south along the border with Pakistan, are for the most part ethnic Pushtun, a group from which the Taliban draws most of its support. If a popular uprising in the south does not get rid of the Islamic fundamentalist regime there too, the country could end up partitioned.

News of the fall of Jalalabad came from Haji Mohammad Zaman, an anti-Taliban commander in exile in Peshawar, who cited recently arrived elders and commanders. Zaman cautioned that these commanders did not want the Northern Alliance to take Kabul or to move farther south.

Despite their allegiance to the Northern Alliance and the effort to oust the Taliban, it was clear that Zaman’s forces did not want the alliance to dominate southern Afghanistan.

“We are in contact with the Northern Alliance, and we decided they should not take Kabul by force,” Zaman said. “We have experience with the Northern Alliance, and they will repeat their same mistakes.”

The Northern Alliance says its gains in the last few days show that it can deal with terrorists and the Taliban on its own, without the need for a large number of U.S. ground troops in Afghanistan.

“I hope that this problem will not be prolonged throughout the winter,” Abdullah said. “I hope the campaign will end with the objectives fully achieved before the winter, or soon.”

He called the alliance’s string of successes on the battlefield “a very good beginning of the end” for Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, who is still believed to be in hiding in Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials said their intelligence indicated that there is growing friction between Bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the senior Taliban leader. The two are having disagreements on tactics, the deployment of fighters and the use of supplies, the officials said, and U.S. strikes have apparently made it tough for them to communicate.

The alliance had been under pressure to stop short of entering Kabul to avoid a repetition of the factional fighting that reduced the city to ruins and killed about 50,000 people before the Taliban took power in 1996. Alliance spokesmen in Washington and Tashkent, the capital of neighboring Uzbekistan, had insisted Monday that their fighters would stay out of the capital. But other leaders indicated that they might take control of the city if the Taliban collapsed and there was “a power vacuum.”

“We don’t want to see any fighting inside Kabul,” Abdullah said Monday. Today, the troops entered with no resistance.

Monday’s fighting was particularly fierce on the outskirts of Kunduz and also in part of Baghlan province to the south, said Ata Mohammed, one of the main Northern Alliance commanders in the north.

“These are the only places that are not under Northern Alliance control,” Ata said by satellite telephone from the region. “We hope and expect to take them tonight or tomorrow.”

The anti-Taliban alliance also said it had seized the western city of Herat, near the Iranian border, Monday after Taliban forces collapsed across the north following the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif on Friday.

But the Taliban was said to be regrouping near Herat, which sits on a main highway that runs southeast toward Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual capital.

President Mohammed Khatami of Iran, which controlled Herat for centuries, said the loss of the city would be a “major defeat” for the Taliban.

“If Herat also falls, northern Afghanistan from Iran to Tajikistan to China will be under opposition control. This is very important as a major defeat for the Taliban,” he told a working breakfast with American reporters in New York, where he had addressed the United Nations on Saturday.

In Mazar-i-Sharif, the first big city to fall in the current campaign, there were unconfirmed reports of unrest and street fighting among various Northern Alliance factions.

“That’s completely untrue,” said Ata. “There are no problems between us.”

Ata also denied reports that his forces had acted improperly during a siege at a former girls school in the city center. Ata insisted that his troops gave the approximately 1,200 Taliban fighters barricaded inside the school ample opportunity to surrender before unleashing an assault.

The death toll was estimated to be between 350 and 400, all Arabs, Pakistanis and other non-Afghans, Ata said, but he said his troops were still counting the corpses. About 250 Taliban were taken prisoner, he said, and their fate will be determined by a court of law; the rest escaped.

Ata’s account of the siege could not be independently confirmed. Until today, there were no journalists or neutral observers in the city.

Though Northern Alliance forces have now won a string of victories across northern Afghanistan, the Pentagon sought to keep its reaction low-key Monday.

Officials gave no public briefings Monday, nor did any officials appear to speak on the record for television cameras.

“We’re not going to be out front on this,” said one senior official.

Haron Amin, a Washington spokesman for the anti-Taliban coalition, attributed the Bush administration’s caution in hailing the rebels’ advance to the fact that the U.S. leadership did not foresee how quickly the Taliban would give way.

“They were completely surprised by this. They couldn’t see that [the Taliban] would fall like a house of cards,” he said.

Pentagon officials did say that, as expected, the U.S. forces will use one of three airfields that Tajikistan has offered as a base for U.S. strike aircraft. This arrangement will allow American planes that have had to fly from distant locations to operate close to the theater.

Victoria Clarke, chief spokeswoman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said the Pentagon’s major focus now is an “intense effort” to channel massive humanitarian relief through northern Afghanistan.

U.S. officials will apparently use supply routes from Uzbekistan that were opened when the Northern Alliance took Mazar-i-Sharif, a crossroads city. Until now, U.S. relief has been coming through air-drops of food.

International aid officials expressed concerns about the security situation in Mazar-i-Sharif, from which they hope to distribute hundreds of tons of food in coming days.

Workers at the river port in the Uzbek border town of Termez loaded two barges with 100-pound sacks of flour Monday that they hoped to shuttle across the river to Afghanistan as early as Wednesday.

A United Nations security detachment crossed the river Monday to inspect the port and other facilities on the Afghan side.

But Michael Huggins, a spokesman for the U.N. World Food Program, said that local WFP staff members in Mazar-i-Sharif had been unable to leave the city and travel to the port to meet the security detachment.

“Our offices there have been looted before, and the World Food Program does not want to take any risk to our staff or to the food we will be delivering,” Huggins said.

Huggins said a 22-truck WFP convoy came under U.S. aerial bombardment over the weekend, with shrapnel destroying about 80% of the shipment of 330 tons of food. There were no reports of injury, but he said the trucks suffered heavy damage.

Aid officials are eager to move food into Afghanistan as rapidly as possible, fearing that the effects of drought and war will cause large-scale hunger over the winter. The World Food Program hopes to send in 30,000 tons in coming months.

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Watson reported from Kabul and Reynolds from Termez. Times staff writers Alissa J. Rubin in Peshawar, Paul Richter and James Gerstenzang in Washington and Robin Wright in New York contributed to this report.