Foreign soldiers fighting on the side of the Taliban have begun massacring their Afghan Taliban comrades in a desperate effort to hang on to the encircled city of Kunduz, refugees and Northern Alliance soldiers here say.
Foreign Taliban soldiers, who have gathered in Kunduz for what appears to be a last stand, have gunned down more than 400 Afghan Taliban soldiers trying to defect to the Northern Alliance, the refugees and the alliance soldiers said.
The 400 were killed in two massacres late last week, refugees said, and were prompted in part by the defection of a local Taliban commander to the Northern Alliance.
According to the reports, Arab and Pakistani soldiers with the Taliban have also begun shooting young men of the Uzbek and Tajik ethnic groups suspected of trying to escape into territory controlled by the Northern Alliance.
Refugees fleeing Kunduz, which has been surrounded by Northern Alliance forces since last week, said foreign Taliban soldiers had executed more than 30 men in two incidents last week.
The reports, which are trickling in as refugees cross the front lines from Kunduz, are sketchy and often secondhand, but they are largely consistent about the date, location and circumstances of the alleged attacks. In the chaos of the fighting, none of the accounts could be confirmed. Even if the Taliban carried out some of the atrocities, it is unclear whether the killers were foreign or Afghan.
"The foreigners came into the village and shot all the men," said Muhammadullah, a 21-year-old man who crossed into Northern Alliance territory on Sunday. "I saw this with my own eyes."
Muhammadullah said he saw foreign Taliban soldiers gun down 25 men in that village, Mullahkarim, on Friday. "Before they fired," he said, "they were speaking a language I did not understand."
General Daoud Khan, the Northern Alliance commander in charge of all forces here, said on Sunday that his men had received nearly identical reports. The general's account essentially matched the reports from the refugees, although Khan estimated that the number of Afghan Taliban killed by foreign fighters was about 125.
"The Taliban is breaking apart," Khan said in an interview at his headquarters in Taliqan, about 30 miles from Kunduz. "They are killing each other. The Arabs and Pakistanis have decided that the Afghans are not pure enough for them, and so they are killing them."
The alleged massacres follow reports that thousands of foreign Taliban soldiers have seized control of Kunduz from local Taliban authorities.
Refugees fleeing the city said that the foreign fighters were occupying the major military and government posts in the city and had grown so distrustful of local Taliban soldiers that they had blocked their access to many buildings and areas, including the front lines.
The refugees said the foreign fighters, whom they described as Pakistanis, Arabs, Chinese and Chechens, were vowing in speeches to fight to the death.
The foreigners often travel with translators, and have beaten and arrested hundreds of Kunduz residents in the last week, reports said.
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