Word: northerners
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...bright, warm Saturday, 300 Taliban soldiers who had fled the American bombardment of Kunduz, their last stronghold in the north of Afghanistan, laid down their weapons in the desert a few miles to the north of Mazar-i-Sharif. They surrendered to Northern Alliance General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who crowed that his forces had achieved a "great victory" as the pows were herded 50 at a time onto flatbed trucks...
...Dostum's intentions were unclear, his security arrangements proved catastrophic. Even before the revolt began, two senior Northern Alliance commanders were killed in the fortress on Saturday night by a hand grenade detonated by a Taliban prisoner. But the conflagration that killed most of the prisoners began on Sunday morning, triggered - according to an emerging consensus among news reports - when prisoners set upon two CIA operatives sent to interrogate them in the hope of weeding out Al Qaeda members. One of these men, Johnny "Mike" Spann, was reportedly beaten to death; the other escaped to a far corner...
...took three days of fighting by Northern Alliance soldiers, backed by U.S. special forces and British SAS troops and American warplanes to quell the uprising. A number of Northern Alliance troops were killed, and five Americans were wounded by a stray bomb dropped by a U.S. plane. Western officials say that as ugly as the bloodbath may have been, the Taliban prisoners brought it upon themselves by putting their captors in mortal danger. But the U.N.'s Robinson and the Red Cross want to examine whether the military response to the revolt was "proportionate" to the threat it represented. Such...
...Northern Alliance spokesman said Thursday that his organization would allow Amnesty International to conduct an investigation, maintaining that prisoners were victim of their own extremism. But Amnesty responded that while it would be happy to send an observer, the responsibility for convening such an inquiry lay with the Northern Alliance, the U.S. and Britain. Which may mean it's unlikely to happen any time soon - because there's certainly not likely to be much pressure either in Washington or Kabul to account for the deaths of some 400 foreigners willing to fight to the death for Osama bin Laden...
...Times of India connects the difficulty in reaching agreement at Bonn with the evolving war on the ground, pointing out that anti-Taliban Pashtun warlords have warned the Northern Alliance to stay out of southern Afghanistan. That poses a strategic dilemma for Washington, since the anti-Taliban Pashtun forces don't appear to have the military muscle to drive the Taliban out of Kandahar and its remaining strongholds, and the U.S. has no desire to use its own ground forces in a pitched battle in Afghanistan...