KABUL, Nov 14: Local warlords grabbed major chunks of territory in the eastern and central provinces from the retreating Taliban on Wednesday, amid conflicting claims about the fighting in Kandahar.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said fighting was raging in and around Kandahar and that he expected the city to fall.

Alliance officials said a “people’s revolution” had started in Kandahar province, which they said would soon be taken.

The Alliance’s spokesman, Abdullah Abdullah, said the Taliban had lost control of Kandahar city and the city was in “total chaos”.

“There is complete chaos in Kandahar. It’s absolute confusion. The Taliban have lost control of the situation and no Taliban officials are to be found,” Abdullah said on Iranian television.

But a Taliban spokesman denied they were losing grip over Kandahar and said both the Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden were still in Afghanistan.

“We are still here and the situation is stable,” Mohammad Tayyeb Agha told Qatar’s Al-Jazeera channel from Kandahar.

The Taliban’s retreat from eastern and central Afghanistan left several key provinces in the hands of local Mujahideen commanders and Kandahar further exposed.

Senior alliance officials and media reports said the provinces of Khost, Kunar, Logar, Nangarhar, Paktia, Paktika and Uruzgan provinces were controlled by “local elders”.

Radio Afghanistan, the national station now under alliance control, also said there was a popular revolt against the Taliban in Ghazni, another key central province.

But the loyalty of the new rulers to the alliance was questionable.

After taking control of Nangarhar and its strategic capital Jalalabad — with the help of heavy US bombing — Younis Khalis, head of a faction of the Hizb-i-Islami, warned off challengers to his authority.

A spokesman for Khalis told Afghan Islamic Press (AIP): “Neither the Northern Alliance nor anybody else should try to enter into Nangarhar.”

Neighbouring Logar went to the army of exiled warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a bitter rival of Khalis, while Khost was in the hands of tribal leaders and jihadi commanders, the AIP said.

The agency said the Taliban had also pulled out of Uruzgan, the home province of the militia’s supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. That left open a path for a move on Omar’s headquarters in Kandahar.

In a defiant message broadcast over the Taliban’s radio network late on Tuesday, Omar — believed to be holed up in Kandahar — ordered his troops to stand and fight.

With international concerns growing over how the new Afghanistan is governed, the Northern Alliance took control of an interim administration in Kabul.

The Alliance — a disparate grouping of ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and other minorities — has invited all Afghan groups to start negotiations on Afghanistan’s future.

But it said its president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, would take the helm of an interim administration while it took part in attempts to form a broad-based government and hold elections in two years.

“We want this interim government to be a broad-based government that all ethnic parties in Afghanistan are involved in. And after two years, the general elections will be held in our country,” senior alliance official Younis Qanooni said.

But he said Rabbani, the president who was ousted by the Taliban in 1996, would head a transitional government in a move likely to anger exiled opposition groups loyal to former king Mohammed Zahir Shah.

The Northern Alliance said it had set up a supreme military and security council to oversee the gathering of an interim body to determine the makeup of a future government.

The council, led by the alliance’s defence minister General Mohammad Qasim Fahim, has three months to arrange the convening of a supreme council of national unity, an official said in a statement read on Radio Afghanistan.

TALIBAN VERSION: Tayyeb Agha, the Taliban spokesman, said “Kandahar and surrounding areas are not in danger” of falling to their adversaries.