BONN/KABUL (Islamweb & News Agencies) - Afghan factions agreed on a blueprint for an interim government at talks in Germany on Tuesday as fighting raged around the last strongholds of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
The breakthrough came after a week of grueling talks between the rival groups in a top-security hotel outside Bonn.
U.N. officials said they hoped the factions would soon sign an agreement naming a broad-based 29-member interim cabinet.
``If all goes well we hope to have a signing ceremony tomorrow,'' U.N. spokesman Ahmad Fawzi told a briefing.
But he cautioned: ``Anything can go wrong.''
The need for agreement took on added urgency after news of factional fighting in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif among groups supposedly allied against the Taliban, even before the hard-line militia has been fully defeated in the south. (Read photo caption below)
The fear is of a repetition of the events of 1992, when groups which now make up the victorious Northern Alliance captured Kabul from Afghanistan's last pro-Moscow government but then wrecked it with internecine warfare.
With most of Afghanistan in anti-Taliban hands, fighting is concentrated on the Taliban's besieged southern stronghold of Kandahar and around isolated cave bases in the east suspected of sheltering bin Laden.
PHOTO CAPTION:
Foreign Taliban prisoners sit in a metal transport container in a base of the First Strike Unit in a Kabul suburb December 4, 2001. The blackened, burnt-out inside of the container is lit by one light bulb, and is home to 13 Taliban fighters captured by Northern Alliance soldiers during the battle for Kabul. (Damir Sagolj/Reuters)