0
KANDAHAR, Jan 16: Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar was offered an amnesty to tempt him to lay down his arms, but he ditched the deal and gave his tribal enemies and their US allies the slip, said the Afghan warlord who negotiated the agreement.
The deal, directed by Hamid Karzai, now the leader of Afghanistan’s newly installed interim government, staved off a new round of fighting and a likely bloodbath in Kandahar’s streets.
But it did not go quite according to plan, veteran guerilla leader Mullah Naqibullah said in an interview.
“I sent a messenger to Omar’s house — it was about Nov 9 or 10 and just over a month after the Americans started their bombing — to seek the surrender of his last stronghold in Kandahar,” he said.
“The next day some 20-30 Taliban commanders came to see me. We negotiated all day, and I persuaded them they should give up their weapons, their ammunition and vehicles to me. In return they could save their lives, and that of Mullah Omar, and leave for their homes.”
The commanders returned from Naqibullah’s camp to Kandahar. After prolonged argument, Omar gave in, saying that if his commanders wanted to give up the struggle, he could no longer stand in their way. But it was a trick, Naqibullah said, and it backfired.
“When I woke in the morning there were no Taliban and no weapons. I had called my fighters in... so we could collect the Taliban arms, drive into central Kandahar and then arrest Mullah Omar.”
The deceiver had been deceived.
FLEEING IN THE NIGHT: Omar and his men had fled in the night, leaving arms, ammunition and vehicles behind.
Naqibullah, well over six feet tall, with a bushy beard and spectacles, is now the proud owner of Mullah Omar’s white Toyota Landcruiser with tinted windows.
Naqibullah said he had acted with the full support of Karzai, who had entered Afghanistan and established himself at Showali Kot, in Kandahar province, to seek a negotiated surrender of the Taliban.
NO BACKDOOR DEAL: He said he had met the reclusive Taliban leader only two or three times in all, and brushed aside any suggestion that he might have deliberately left Kandahar’s back door ajar, giving the Taliban chief ample time to make good his escape.
He was close to Karzai, he said, and it was at Karzai’s urging that he had surrendered his arms and ammunition to the Taliban in the early 1990s in the belief that the movement would bring order to a lawless southern Afghanistan.
Naqibullah said he and Karzai persuaded Taliban commanders to realise they had been defeated. That their only remaining bastion was Kandahar and there was no point in further resistance in the face of the US bombing and the opposition advance.
No direct contact was made with Mullah Omar during the negotiations. But there were telephone calls, messengers and face-to-face meetings with his representatives, and Naqibullah and Karzai kept in touch by satellite telephone.—Reuters
