Word: kunduz
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...mile Taloqan front; estimates of Taliban strength range from 5,000 to 10,000, so the rebels are relying on U.S. bombing for advantage. The ultimate aim is to link up with troops who took Mazar-i-Sharif on Friday night and to advance on the Taliban stronghold of Kunduz, thus reclaiming the entire northern part of the country...
...With most of the country now in anti-Taliban hands, the U.S. bombers have a fast-dwindling set of targets. The only Taliban lines left to pound last weekend were in Kunduz, the last government garrison in the north, and in Kandahar. Last week the Taliban was on the verge of quitting both cities, but defiant Taliban cadres made their stands. In the north, the estimated 6,000 Taliban troops who retreated to Kunduz from the decimated fronts at Mazar-i-Sharif and Taloqan had their supply lines and escape routes cut off. They had two options: surrender...
...holy month may be a time both of fasting and fierce fighting. The Taliban negotiated away their last stronghold Friday, Mullah Omar reportedly handing the city over to two Pashtun warlords and heading for the hills. Thousands of Taliban fighters, many of them foreign volunteers, remained under siege at Kunduz in the north, with the Northern Alliance threatening to launch a bloody assault by nightfall Friday if they fail to surrender. The era of Taliban power is plainly over, but the next chapter of Afghan conflict may have already begun as rival anti-Taliban factions stake competing claims for power...
...volunteers at Kunduz may be more inclined to fight to the death, knowing well that the difference between surrender and defiance may simply be the difference between a heroic death and a humiliating one - even though many of their Afghan Taliban comrades may simply surrender. For the movement's surviving leadership, a retreat for the mountains and a protracted guerrilla campaign appears to be the only survival option facing the battered militia, even as a number of its senior leaders were reportedly captured by opposition forces Friday. They've also shrewdly handed over the southern cities to rival Pashtun forces...
...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...