November 6, 2001	Tuesday	Shaba’an 19, 1422

ISLAMABAD, Nov 5: US warplanes on Monday pursued their pounding of Taliban positions as the militia said it repelled a major opposition offensive in the see-sawing battle for control of Mazar-i-Sharif.

The Taliban-controlled northern city is a strategic prize for the opposition Northern Alliance as a key supply and staging area on the road to the Afghan capital Kabul from Uzbekistan, where at least 1,000 US troops are deployed.

The reports of fresh fighting came as the Northern Alliance’s top commander said his forces were ready to march on Kabul.

The Taliban continued to deride the US-led military campaign as a “debacle” in the making.

A senior Taliban spokesman, Education Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, said the air strikes had failed to dent the militia’s morale and military capability.

“We are ready for a long war and we hope to defeat the United States, which the rest of world calls a superpower,” Muttaqi told journalists in Kabul. “The US should revise its wrong, terrorist policies; otherwise this war, which may last for decades, will burn many Americans and Afghans.”

He accused the US of cowardice for avoiding a “face-to-face” showdown on the ground.

The Mazar-i-Sharif front has been the scene for the past week of heavy US bombing to clear the way for a definitive drive by anti-Taliban forces. However, all attempts so far — the last on Monday — have been repulsed by the militia.

“The US and the opposition have been making propaganda that they are going to launch a heavy attack towards Mazar-i-Sharif,” Muttaqi said. “Finally, today, the attack was launched. After a short time, their offensive was repulsed and the opposition left 35 dead bodies on the battlefield.”

Northern Alliance spokesmen confirmed the attack, but said it was interrupted only to allow further US air strikes.

“I haven’t seen the bombs stop falling for more than 10 minutes since yesterday morning,” opposition spokesman Mohammad Ashraf Nadeem said. “We’re hopeful that we will succeed in this battle.”

In the Northern Alliance stronghold of Jabal Saraj, near the front line with Kabul, the opposition’s top commander said his troops were now ready to march on the capital — but all visible signs pointed to the contrary.

“We are ready, but it all depends on our strategy and the circumstances,” said General Mohammad Qasim Fahim, successor to the sorely missed legendary commander Ahmed Shah Masood, slain two days before the September 11 attacks.

“These military exercises show we have reached the highest level of prepardness,” Fahim said.

But conversations between correspondents and lower-ranking officers suggested the Alliance was far from ready: troops were desperately short of ammunition and many had not been paid for six months.

One commander said each of his tanks had been allocated 100 litres of fuel. “Just about enough to drive to the front line and back,” he said.

The Jabal Seraj maneuvers included an inspection of some 2,000 troops clad in fresh new uniforms and 17 tanks and 20 armored personnel carriers.

The tanks had a round of target practice at a hillside bunker some 500 metres away, which one commander described as a mock hideout of Osama bin Laden, accused of masterminding the September attacks.

Only a few of the shells shot during a 10-minute volley were seen to hit the target.

RABBANI: Burhanuddin Rabbani, the UN-recognized president of Afghanistan ousted by the Taliban in 1996, called on his troops to follow the example of Masood.

“Do not forget his resistance,” he told fighters lined on a dusty hillside, insisting that it was up to them and not foreign troops to oust the Taliban.

“If you cannot defeat them, nobody can, because you have the experience that no other foreigner has,” he said.

Rabbani is scheduled to meet on Wednesday in Tajikistan with President Ahmet Necdet Sezer of Turkey, the only Muslim-majority NATO member, a Northern Alliance spokesman said.

Ankara, which has historic ties with Afghanistan, said Thursday it was sending an elite 90-man unit to the north of the country to “combat terrorism” and help train opposition forces.

On Monday, US bombers also hit Taliban positions north of Kabul, recently spared the brunt of US strikes which have been concentrated on the Mazar-i-Sharif and Tajik border fronts, the Afghan Islamic Press news agency reported.

With the harsh Afghan winter barely weeks away, diplomats and US officials warned the Taliban were increasingly likely to retreat into cities and become impossible to dislodge without potentially ruinous house-to-house combat.

One exiled Afghan commander, saying winter would make ground operations all but impossible, pleaded for weapons.

“For the price of six cruise missiles, we could liberate... Nangarhar, Laghman and Kunar” provinces, said Peshawar-based Haji Mohammad Zaman. A cruise missile costs between 600,000 dollars and 1.2 million dollars, depending on the model.

The Taliban pursued their campaign on the propaganda front, claiming that 95 US soldiers had died since the military campaign began on October 7.

“The death toll of US soldiers in this war has now approximately reached 95,” the Taliban embassy in Pakistan said, regretting that the bodies could not be returned because Washington denied the incidents.

Washington has yet to confirm the combat death of a single US soldier in Afghanistan.—AFP