US special forces hunted for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan yesterday as his battered and beleaguered Taliban protectors issued defiant messages from their southern stronghold of Kandahar.
With their US-backed civil war foes in control of the capital Kabul and advancing on several fronts, the fundamentalist Muslim militia and their leader Mullah Mohammad Omar vowed to regroup and bounce back.
PHOTO: AFP
But reports from the Kandahar area and from US officials spoke of anti-Taliban revolts there -- and even fighting in the city itself.
Tribal leader Hamid Karzai, inside Afghanistan drumming up support for the return of ex-King Zahir Shah, said the people of Kandahar had revolted against the Taliban.
"The people have totally risen against them," Karzai said by satellite telephone from the central province of Uruzgan.
"The Kandahar people have taken to the city streets. The Taliban are withdrawing heavy equipment out of Kandahar."
There was no independent confirmation but non-governmental organizations spoke of reports of hundreds of Afghan families fleeing toward Pakistan because of fighting in the area.
American officials said Washington was prepared to send troops into caves and mountains in the south in a guerrilla campaign to ferret out bin Laden, the man it blames for the Sept. 11 suicide hijack attacks on the US.
Reports last night were that US airstrikes on two buildings in Afghanistan killed "some senior leadership" of the Taliban milita and al-Qeada terrorist network, a Pentagon spokeswoman said yesterday.
"One of our primary objectives over the last few days has been to go after command and control -- Taliban and al-Qeada leadership," said Victoria Clarke, spokeswoman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Speaking with reporters, she said the strikes on buildings near Kabul on Tuesday and Kandahar on Wednesday had resulted in the deaths of senior members of both groups.
"There was some senior leadership. ... No evidence that it was Osama bin Laden," she added.
US Vice President, Dick Cheney, said bin Laden, who has a US$5 million price on his head, had fewer and fewer options.
"The circumstances on the ground have changed dramatically just in a matter of days, and areas that were probably safe for him 48 or 72 hours ago are no longer safe for him," he told CBS television. "We'll keep after him until we smoke him out and run him to ground," he added.
Opposition forces say they had taken the city's airport and Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said there was "complete chaos" in the city. But Pakistani Taliban fighters coming back across the border from Afghanistan said Kandahar had not fallen.
Mullah Omar, quoted by a spokesman interviewed by the BBC, said his forces would regroup and fight on.
"The Taliban might have committed some mistakes but it is a big development for them to regroup and reorganize," he said, adding that four to five of Afghanistan's 29 provinces were still in Taliban hands.
"Once we did not even have a single province, but later we captured all the provinces," he said of his militia's race to power in the mid-1990s. "We have lost the captured provinces but it makes no difference."
When asked whether the Taliban would participate in a future broad-based government, the spokesman quoted Omar as replying, "We would prefer death to the government of fascists."
In other battlefield developments, anti-Taliban forces said they were poised to take the enclave of Kunduz in the north.
With battlefield advances outpacing political plans, world leaders sought a solution for a country racked by war since 1979.
The UN Security Council on Wednesday unanimously endorsed an Afghan political plan envisaging a two-year interim government bringing all ethnic groups under one umbrella with a multinational security force to protect them.
Spokesmen for the Northern Alliance said it had no desire to cling to power but that it would run Kabul until a broad-based post-Taliban government was formed.
Alliance factions have already split Kabul along ethnic lines -- a sign it could be reverting to the divisions that sparked civil war when the groups took over from the Soviet-installed government in 1992.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique