The rebel Northern Alliance has announced the capture of large areas in northern Afghanistan, as well as the key city of Taloquan, in what appear to be a series of major losses for the ruling Taliban regime, said reports.
Taliban forces appeared to be "on the run" in most of the northern and central parts of Afghanistan, a BBC Online correspondent stationed in the capital Kabul reported.
Opposition leaders said Sunday they had destroyed the most elite Taliban fighting force, and were driving ahead on three fronts and might seize Kabul,according to Reuters.
The move to take Kabul would come despite repeated warnings from the US and Pakistan, who fear it could lead to a repeat of the wars that raged between ethnic groups in the early 1990s.
The Taliban still control the hills to the north of the capital, above the Bagram airbase, said the BBC.
Taleban fighters have set up roadblocks and told a BBC correspondent that they were searching for possible infiltrators.
According to the news service, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that capturing Kabul was not a primary aim of the American-led war in Afghanistan,
For its part, the opposition said Sunday that "We would prefer to achieve a broad political agreement ...before moving into Kabul. But we do not commit ourselves to this if there is a political vacuum."
SUDDEN REBEL ADVANCE
Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah on Sunday described a series of battles that left the last major Taliban force in the north entirely beseiged in the city of Kundu, according to Reuters.
"The importance of the dramatic defeat of the Taliban...is that they lost their main fighting forces," Abdullah told a news conference, said the agency.
He estimated the original Taliban force in the north at 15,000, including foreign units regarded as the most strong, and claimed that hundreds of Taliban, including many Pakistanis, had died in fighting around the main city of Mazar-e-Sharif, said the report.
Meanwhile, the BBC cited Abdullah as saying that 15,000 Taliban troops were trapped in the north-eastern Kunduz province, and that alliance forces were advancing on them.
There was no independent confirmation of this report,said the news service, but Taliban officials said their lines had come under heavy US bombardment and they had made a "tactical withdrawal" from three northern provinces.
Veteran mujahideen leader Ismail Khan told Reuters his forces had seized the key town of Qala-i-Nau in western Afghanistan Sunday after an intense four-hour battle and were now heading toward Herat.
The opposition forces further claimed to have seized the strategic town of Pul-e-Khumri, north of Kabul, said the BBC.
The US launched the war in Afghanistan after blaming the Sept. 11 suicide attacks on New York and the Pentagon on Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, a longtime "guest" of the Taliban militia - Albawaba.com
