Word: kabul
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...their calm command posts or in small mud houses near the dozy front, they assure visitors that Taliban morale is nosediving, that desertions are widespread. Checking such assertions can be bewildering. A group of journalists spent a day looking for the sole confirmed deserter on the Kabul front, and at first they were told he could not be reached because he was at the front line working the radios, calling on his former colleagues to surrender. Many hours later, he was tracked down in a bazaar. He, the commander to whom he had surrendered and a dozen or so other...
There are some serious people in the Northern Alliance, however, and their picture of the Taliban is more sobering. These people--intelligence officers, security officials and spies--do not think the Taliban resistance in Kabul will collapse at the first U.S. salvo. A Northern Alliance fighter who has viewed the Taliban up close is Saif, a tense, nervy man in his 30s who is a spy for one of the alliance commanders. When he was interviewed last week, he had just spent 10 days or so in Kabul assessing Taliban strength...
...Taliban has at least 4,000 hardened fighters in the city, Saif says. Their commander is Mullah Obaidullah, the Defense Minister. Obaidullah is a formidable adversary, says Mohammed Aref, chief of staff of a regiment on the front line facing Kabul. Officials and soldiers on this side who are in contact with the Taliban--spies, escapees or front-line officers who sometimes talk to their opponents by radio--say their enemy's morale is higher than Northern Alliance spokesmen would like to believe. The Taliban reaction to the attacks in the U.S. was a mixture of jubilation and fatalism, Northern...
...along the Kabul front, Taliban fighters repeat the same line with apparent conviction: they are fighting for two great champions of Islam--Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. During a radio exchange on a front west of Kabul, a local Taliban commander told Khademudin, his childhood playmate and now the enemy commander in the area, that "bin Laden is a guest of Afghanistan who has sacrificed much for the country." Khan Jan recalls a recent radio address by Mullah Omar. "If we die, that is fine," the mullah said, "but we will never give him up." A Northern Alliance security...
...entice the opposing commanders to switch sides. Carefully lowering his considerable bulk onto cushions spread around the floor--most Northern Alliance commanders are at least four clothes sizes larger than the rank and file--General Abdul Rahim Abdurahim explains how it works. He has been sending envoys to Kabul to meet with generals who switched sides before the Taliban victory in 1996. It is going well, and they are keen to rejoin the Northern Alliance, he assures us. It is just a matter of time...