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After capturing the capital city of Kabul, the Northern Alliance was forced to detach contingents of its forces to northern battle arenas in Konduz and Khanabad, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly sources.
The Northern Alliance bypassed those two towns in its rush to the capital.
In addition, Taliban and al-Qaida resistance persists in five other pockets around the predominantly Shiite town of Herat, where at least 3,000 Taliban fighters are still in the field. In Mazar-e-Sharif, further north, the Taliban repulsed Northern Alliance militiamen today and recaptured the town’s northern suburbs along with arms dumps.
The heaviest fighting is in Konduz and Khanabad, where close to 15,000 Taliban and al-Qaida fighters are fiercely defending the two fortified towns with the help of 120 tanks and artillery.
David Chater, who is covering this battle for Sky Television, reported today seeing a large group of Chinese Muslims fighting alongside the al-Qaida and Taliban forces.
The presence of Chinese Muslim fighters with Osama bin Laden’s network in Afghanistan was first exposed by DEBKA-Net-Weekly.
Gulf sources add that some 500 Saudis are also fighting with al-Qaida. They are members of the Saudi dissident “Arabian Peninsula Liberators” from the Nejd and Assir provinces of the oil kingdom. The continued U.S. aerial bombardment of Taliban lines in Konduz and Khanabad has reportedly caused many Saudi casualties.
Sources in Pakistan, meanwhile, disclose that the Taliban supreme leader Mulla Mustafa Omar, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri held a war council this afternoon on the beleaguered situation of their forces – probably in some part of their Hindu Kush fortified hideout. It was attended by a group of Taliban commanders. They agreed that while their situation was grave, not all was lost.
They assessed the Northern Alliance’s lines and fighting strength as being overextended and their provisional bases capable of being overwhelmed before they took hold, if the Taliban and their allies could regroup and fight back. The Northern Alliance, they judged, would be hard pressed to detach substantial forces from Kabul, where they were needed to secure the alliance’s interests in any future administration.
The Taliban forces scattered in the foothills of Hindu Kush along a strip 500 kilometers long between Jalalabad and Kandahar, and the pockets behind Northern Alliance front lines, could be enlisted to hit the Northern Alliance from behind and cut its supply lines.
In a week’s time, when Afghanistan is covered in snow, small guerrilla units could start launching killing forays against Northern Alliance forces, keeping this tactic up for the duration of the winter – even if Jalalabad and Kandahar shared the fate of most other cities and fell to the Northern Alliance.
Omar’s call on his fighters to regroup and fight was therefore both a long-term strategy and a piece of political insurance. As long as it was active in the field, the predominantly Pashtun Taliban warranted a stake in any future administration in Kabul, as representative of the country’s largest ethnic group.
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