Northern Alliance vows to march on Kabul next week
DUSHANBE, Nov. 12, Kyodo - Afghanistan's opposition Northern Alliance will complete its encirclement of the capital Kabul by the end of this week and begin advancing on the city next week, a spokesman for ousted Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani said Monday.
Yunus Konuni made the comment in a telephone interview with Kyodo News.
The comment follows Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah's statement Sunday that the anti-Taliban alliance now controls more than 50% of the country.
The alliance has made a series of dramatic advances since capturing the strategic northern town of Mazar-e-Sharif on Friday. Abdullah said the alliance has since captured the central city of Bamyan, Takhar Province, including its capital Taloqan, and Qala Nau, capital of northwestern Badghis Province.
In New York on Saturday, U.S. President George W. Bush and the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, held talks and agreed not to support a Northern Alliance-controlled Kabul at a time when the framework for a post-Taliban Afghanistan has not yet been decided.
The alliance, largely composed of ethnic groups that dominate the northern half of the country, is feared by many in Kabul who remember atrocities committed there in the early 1990s by warring groups that now make up the alliance.
However, Northern Alliance officials have insisted there will be no repeat of the violent in-fighting if they take the city again.
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