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.
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."
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