Word: kunduz
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Even with the Taliban's surrender of Kunduz supposedly a done deal, the fighting for the last holdout town in northern Afghanistan was fierce on Thursday. And the confusion on the battlefield offered important clues as to the nature of the power shift in Afghanistan over the past month. Earlier Thursday, the commander of the Northern Alliance's Uzbek forces to the west of the city, General Rashid Dostum, announced that he had secured an agreement from Kunduz's Taliban commanders to lay down their arms by Sunday. But Northern Alliance Interior Minister Yunus Qanooni said from Kabul that cease...
...from his headquarters in Taloqan. Long-running tensions between the Uzbek and Tajik factions of the Northern Alliance may become sharply exacerbated now that the Alliance is claiming control over large swathes of territory. And those divisions, too, could have played a role in prompting Thursday's advance on Kunduz...
...Alliance commanders had been discussing surrender terms all week with senior Taliban commanders from Kunduz. The Alliance had given the Taliban forces until Thursday morning to surrender or face a frontal assault, but Dostum's cease-fire announcement appeared to have averted a bloodbath. Hours later, however, the guns were blazing and Alliance tanks were driving towards the city. Initially, the Taliban commanders had sought safe passage for the foreign fighters to Pakistan, but the U.S. was having none of a deal that might allow Al Qaeda fighters to escape...
...Although Taliban chief Mullah Omar has urged the defenders of Kunduz to resist, the local commander, Mullah Dadullah, has previously clashed with his supreme leader. Local observers are not surprised that he may be seeking an honorable way of keeping his men alive. And like those who retreated from Mazar-i-Sharif, many Afghan Taliban fighters in Kunduz may be quite willing to leave the foreigners to their fate, if not to turn their guns on the "tourists" who have reportedly killed hundreds of Afghan Taliban...
...which is to say there is still a long way and a lot of bloodletting to go. Mazar had barely been liberated last Friday when Dostum's forces overran the towns of Tashkurghan and Hairatan and zeroed in on Kunduz, one of the last Taliban strongholds in northern Afghanistan. A senior Alliance official told TIME that the Alliance now controls the northwest and has advanced as far south as Pul-i-Khumri?100 miles away from the capital, Kabul. The official said Taliban soldiers stranded in Kunduz and further east in Taloqan have been cut off from fresh supplies...