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Top bin Laden deputy said killed; Taliban leader reported ready to abandon Kandahar
Friday, Nov. 16, 2001
 
• "Operation Enduring Freedom"
• U.S. Arsenal
• Background on Osama bin Laden
By KATHY GANNON
Associated Press Writer

KABUL, Afghanistan – In twin blows to the Taliban and al-Qaida, the regime's supreme leader was reported ready Friday to abandon his home base of Kandahar, and U.S. officials disclosed that Osama bin Laden's military chief may have been killed.

The developments came as U.S. warplanes struck the Taliban's two remaining strongholds, Kandahar and the northern city of Kunduz, on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

If confirmed, the death of bin Laden's military chief Mohammed Atef would deal a serious setback to the al-Qaida terrorist network.

Its Taliban protectors are already reeling from sweeping territorial losses and their flight from the capital, Kabul, this week. U.S. officials said the Taliban had lost control of more than two-thirds of Afghanistan.

Atef was a close confidant of bin Laden, and his daughter was married to bin Laden's son. U.S. officials suspect him of involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which triggered the current military confrontation.

One U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Atef is believed to have died during an American airstrike earlier this week near Kabul, the Afghan capital. Another official said Atef's body has not been located.

At Great Lakes, Ill., Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said U.S. special forces troops have engaged in ground combat in Afghanistan, "killing Taliban that won't surrender" as well as al-Qaida terrorists.

No Americans have been killed or wounded in the encounters, he said while disclosing that hundreds of U.S. special operations troops are on the ground in northern and southern Afghanistan assisting opposition forces and hunting al-Qaida leaders. Rumsfeld previously had indicated that their numbers were in the dozens.

"They have gone into places and met resistance and dealt with it," he told reporters while flying from Washington to the Navy's recruit training center, where he spoke at a graduation ceremony.

The report that the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was ready to leave Kandahar would be a dramatic development, if borne out – amounting to Taliban abandonment of the city that was its birthplace. American military officials were skeptical.

"I don't put much stock in at this point. I don't believe it," said Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, in Washington.

"I think that our forces who are there are still operating under the assumption that it is a hostile environment. I think the opposition groups are operating in the same way."

The Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press agency said Omar had agreed to leave the city within 24 hours and would head for the mountains, turning it over to local leaders from Pashtun tribes – ethnic kin to most of the top Taliban leadership.

Under the deal reportedly reached with tribal leaders, control of the city would pass to Mullah Naqibullah and Haji Basher, two former commanders of Afghan resistance forces in the war against Soviet invaders. Basher is close to Yunus Khalis, a Pashtun leader who took over the northeastern city of Jalalabad this week.

An official of Harkat ul-Mujahedeen, a Pakistan-based group allied with the Taliban, said Omar was pressured by local leaders to leave the city and end U.S. attacks. Reluctantly, Omar accepted the deal Friday night in return for safe passage out of the city, the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The South Asian Dispatch Agency quoted Taliban official Mohammad Jamal as confirming the decision to leave Kandahar, saying "we have been asked to re-group to prepare for the next phase of jihad," or holy war.

The agency's correspondent in Kandahar reported several pickup trucks loaded with Taliban fighters heading south out of the city.

Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun leader who has been trying to organize an anti-Taliban uprising, told CNN that Taliban leaders would be offered amnesty if they surrendered and gave up their weapons. If they leave Kandahar, he said, they would have nowhere else to go.

Karzai's brother Ahmed told The Associated Press that Hamid Karzai was now in control of the capital of Uruzgan province, Tarin Kot. The Taliban governor has left the province, and Karzai moved in Friday, Ahmed Karzai said in a telephone interview from the southern Pakistani city of Quetta.

Contradictory reports about conditions inside Kandahar had swirled in past days. U.S. officials had said there were reports of street fighting, but arriving refugees and even a leader of Pashtun anti-Taliban forces had said the Taliban appeared to retain their grip on the city.

U.S. planes bombed Kandahar again overnight, continuing a pattern of relentless strikes on the city and its environs. The Afghan Islamic Press said the Taliban's foreign ministry office was wrecked, along with a mosque located in the eastern part of the city.

It claimed at least 11 civilians were killed, but that could not be independently confirmed.

In the north of Afghanistan, fighters from the northern alliance were laying siege to the city of Kunduz, backed by U.S. airstrikes. "Kunduz is at a standoff," Stufflebeem said, "and there are a number of reports that indicate there are ... forces determined to fight and they're dug in."

The defenders include an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 foreigners loyal to bin Laden. They are much less likely than Afghan Taliban to simply negotiate a surrender or slip away, as the bulk of Taliban forces did in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif and in Kabul.

Northern alliance officials said there had been no breakthrough in negotiations for the city's surrender.

Some Muslim nations, notably U.S. ally Pakistan, had urged restraint during Ramadan. However, Pakistan noted a reduction in the intensity of the strikes – a move that reflects a U.S. strategy more geared toward tightly targeted raids from the air, coupled with the presence of U.S. special forces on the ground.

In other developments:

— Aides to Afghanistan's former king expressed concern Friday that the northern alliance appeared unwilling to participate in a U.N.-backed meeting to plan a postwar transitional government. United Nations hopes to preside over a careful, rational reorganization of Afghanistan are quickly being outstripped by the power grabs of warlords who are filling the vacuum left by departing Taliban forces.

— British troops arrived at the Bagram airfield, north of Kabul, on what the Ministry of Defense said was a mission to prepare the facility for use in a future humanitarian mission. France sent its first contingent of soldiers to northern Afghanistan on Friday as part of an international effort to help secure the area for the delivery of humanitarian aid.

— Al-Qaida had a formula for making ricin, one of the deadliest known poisons, The Times of London newspaper reported Friday. The Times said it found instructions for making the biological chemical ricin – an untraceable poison that is twice as deadly as cobra venom – in an al-Qaida safehouse in Kabul.

— The United Nations moved another 220 tons of food to Afghanistan from Uzbekistan on Friday, part of an effort to increase supplies in the country as winter approaches. It estimates that some 3 million Afghans depend on food aid. The area most in need is the north of the country, which borders Uzbekistan.

— Five British Muslims have been killed along with scores of other foreign volunteers fighting for the Taliban in northern Afghanistan, officials of Islamic militant groups said Friday in Islamabad.

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