Taliban Won't Leave Kandahar, Opponents Divided

14/05/2001| IslamWeb

KABUL/SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan (Islamweb & News Agencies) - The Taliban vowed on Saturday not to give up their southern Afghan stronghold of Kandahar without a fight, as new cracks opened among the fractious factions and foreign forces arrayed against them.The Taliban's sole ambassador, the envoy to Pakistan Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, returned from Afghanistan saying he had an important message for Islamabad, and denied Osama bin Laden had left Afghanistan.
``Osama is inside Afghanistan, but I don't know whether he is in our (Taliban) territory or the area controlled by the Northern Alliance,'' Zaeef told reporters at the border.
Ousted former President Burhanuddin Rabbani returned to Kabul five years after the Taliban drove him out, and his Northern Alliance said it did not want foreign troops in the country.
The United Nations said the Alliance was obstructing urgent talks needed to construct a broad-based post-Taliban government.
Taliban officials dismissed reports that Mullah Mohammad Omar, their supreme leader who lost an eye fighting the Soviets in the 1980s, had ordered the fundamentalist militia to withdraw from Kandahar and head into the mountains.
The Taliban have been pounded by 42 days of relentless U.S. air strikes to punish them for harboring bin Laden.
``Kandahar is in complete control of the Taliban, and reports of the withdrawal of the Taliban are baseless,'' spokesman Maulvi Najibullah told Reuters in the small town of Spin Boldak just over the border from Pakistan. ``Life is normal in Kandahar.''
The Afghan Islamic Press said on Friday that the Taliban, facing a popular uprising even among fellow ethnic Pashtuns in the south, had agreed to pull out of the city.