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Politics : Piffer Thread on Political Rantings and Ravings -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HG who wrote (4879)	11/30/2001 1:31:51 AM
From: HG	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14610

Old news now. But the highighted part made me feel awful...so i copied the news item here... Bin Laden hunted in shrinking pockets of Afghanistan Sayed Salahuddin & Claudia Parsons (Reuters) Kabul/Desert Strip, November 29 The forces hunting Osama bin Laden and Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar said on Thursday the two were alive in Afghanistan, as US troops and tribal armies closed in on their suspected hideouts. Hemmed in to a shrinking corner by nearly eight weeks of relentless US bombing and ground offensives by their Afghan foes, the Taliban now face another threat -- hundreds of US Marines pouring into a remote desert airstrip within striking distance of the militia's last stronghold, Kandahar. The US flag was hoisted above the Marines Corp base on Thursday by a lance corporal born in Kabul who fled the country in the 1980s after the Soviet invasion. "I'm coming back home," said Ajmal Achekzai. The Northern Alliance said bin Laden, chief suspect in the September 11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, and Mullah Omar, who lost an eye fighting the Soviets in the 1980s, were still at large. "They are alive and still in Afghanistan," spokesman Mohammad Habeel told Reuters. He said the two men could be hiding either in the Safi Koh mountains near the eastern city of Jalalabad or jagged ranges around Kandahar, the last city still in Taliban hands. In Washington, a Defense Department official said the thrust of the US military campaign was now to sever the Taliban and al Qaeda chain of command to encourage their fighters to give up. "If we break the leadership of the Taliban and break the leadership of al Qaeda, there is reduced motivation for troops to stay loyal to the cause and continue to fight," Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem told reporters. He said leaders of the Taliban and bin Laden's al Qaeda network were finding it harder to communicate with their troops. CBS Evening News reported late on Wednesday that several senior Taliban officials, including the head of military intelligence and at least two government ministers, had defected to the Northern Alliance and were now in Pakistan. There was no immediate confirmation of the report from the Alliance or the Pakistani government. BLOODBATH Mullah Omar has urged his forces to fight to the death -- an order that may have contributed to a bloodbath at a fort where Taliban prisoners were being held near the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, and to the reported massacre of 160 Taliban fighters captured by tribal forces in the south. Hundreds of Taliban prisoners and dozens of Alliance fighters, as well as an American CIA officer, were killed in a three-day battle at the fort near Mazar-i-Sharif this week. US air strikes helped crush the revolt -- and injured five US troops and some Northern Alliance fighters with an errant bomb. The Northern Alliance has said probably all 600 prisoners, including Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens, and more than 40 of its own fighters were killed in the revolt. Habeel said the Alliance was forced to kill the prisoners after they seized Kalashnikov assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers and unleashed mayhem in the fortress. "We had no intention of maltreating them. They got killed because of their own stubbornness," Habeel said. Television footage showed mangled bodies of al Qaeda fighters sprawled in trenches and littering the courtyards of the fort. In the south, a commander with ethnic Pashtun forces said on Wednesday 160 captured Taliban fighters who had earlier refused to surrender were executed in front of US military personnel. "We tried our best to persuade (the Taliban) to surrender before we attacked. We asked them many times, quoted the Koran and even offered them money," said the commander from forces loyal to Gul Agha, a former mujahideen governor of Kandahar. He said tribal elders had also tried to persuade the Taliban to surrender before the battle last week for the strategic town of Takteh Pol between Kandahar and the Pakistani border. "But they replied with abuse so we had no choice. We executed around 160 Taliban that were captured. They were made to stand in a long line and five or six of our fighters used light machine guns on them," said the commander, who declined to be identified. He said those executed included Pakistanis. The commander said seven or eight US military personnel, who had been filming the fighting, tried unsuccessfully to prevent the killings. His account could not be verified. STRUGGLE FOR UNITY As the US military and Afghan tribal forces try to prise the Taliban from their last strongholds, the Northern Alliance is locked in talks in Bonn with backers of Afghanistan's ex-king and two other exiled groups on the country's political future. On Wednesday night, the Alliance agreed to broad outlines of a mechanism to share power with supporters of deposed King Zahir Shah, a first step toward an interim government that diplomats hope will pave the way to elections in two years. The Alliance's foreign minister said in Kabul that foreign peacekeepers could have a role in a post-Taliban Afghanistan, softening its previously stated opposition to any such force. "Our preference would be an Afghan force, composed of all ethnic groups," Abdullah Abdullah told CNN. "But if we have to go for a multinational force, we would consider it positively. There is no rejection for that but a preference otherwise... We are flexible in that regard." The Alliance has said at the UN-sponsored talks that it sees no need for foreign peacekeepers to provide security in a land ravaged by two decades of conflict. But rivalry between the mainly ethnic Tajik and Uzbek Northern Alliance and the Pashtun tribes that dominate the south and make up Afghanistan's largest ethnic group complicates the search for peace. The Pashtuns tribes and the Alliance are also racked by internal squabbles, making agreement even harder. Aid workers say insecurity worsened by the last 54 days of conflict is hampering their efforts to deliver food and other desperately needed relief supplies in many parts of Afghanistan. "Security on the roads inside Afghanistan remains a huge problem," the UN refugee agency said on Wednesday. A relief vehicle came under fire on the Kabul-Jalalabad road on Tuesday when the driver refused to stop for six gunmen who tried to flag down the car. A passenger was wounded in the arm, UNHCR said in a statement. Four journalists, including two from Reuters, were murdered by armed men on the same road last week. Eight journalists have been killed in the conflict, and another is reported to be held hostage by the Taliban in the town of Spin Boldak.