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Wednesday, November 14, 2001 - Web posted at 9:28:03 am GMT

ANTI-TALIBAN forces seized control of the Afghan capital Kabul on Tuesday and reported dramatic gains in the hardline Islamists' southern heartland.

With advances by the opposition Northern Alliance far outstripping political plans, world leaders sought to set up a broad-based government to replace the Taliban, who have been harbouring those blamed for September's mass killing on US soil.

The United Nations said it would send representatives to Kabul immediately and called for all factions to meet to settle the country's future.

A top Alliance official called for UN involvement and invited all Afghan groups, except the Taliban, to come to Kabul to discuss a future administration.

US warplanes were pursuing the fleeing Taliban, and their supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar urged his scattered troops not to behave like slaughtered chickens but to regroup, fight on and obey their commanders.

In Kabul, elated young men shaved off the beards mandated by the Taliban, and music, banned by their religious police, was played for the first time in five years.

There was no word on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born militant blamed for the Sept 11 attack with hijacked airliners that killed some 4 500 people in New York and Washington and unleashed the US war on Afghanistan.

Bin Laden, whom Bush has said he wants "dead or alive", was last been reported to be in the Kabul region by a Pakistani journalist who interviewed him.

In the United States, transport officials said early information suggested the crash of an American Airlines Airbus in New York with the death of all 260 people on board on Monday was an accident - and not an attack like the ones that prompted America's war on terrorism.

As the Northern Alliance, made up of mainly ethnic minority Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, advanced triumphantly southward into the lands of the majority Pushtun and word of reprisal killings emerged, international leaders issued appeals for the respect of human rights.

Military analysts voiced caution over the characteristically seesaw nature of conflict in the landlocked central Asian country, where dramatic advances are sometimes followed by equally dramatic reverses.

But on the field of the immediate conflict the Taliban's rule appeared to be in tatters.

Greeted by cheering residents, opposition fighters surged into Kabul in defiance of international pressure to stay out for fear their control of the capital would alienate both the Pushtun and neighbouring Pakistan, a key ally in Bush's coalition, where Pushtun form a large part of the population.

Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said his fighters had only entered the city to maintain security.

"There was no option for us but to send our security forces into Kabul," Abdullah said as he invited the United Nations to send in teams for talks and called on all Afghan groups to come to Kabul to discuss a future administration.

"Taliban excluded," he added.

In Rome, a senior adviser to Afghanistan's exiled former King Zahir Shah, seen as a key player in the country's political future, said the Northern Alliance had broken an agreement with the monarch by entering Kabul.

But an Alliance spokesman in London called on Zahir Shah to send a delegation to Kabul for talks on a new government .

As the Taliban retreated in droves to their southern stronghold of Kandahar, witnesses arriving in Pakistan said thousands of anti-Taliban tribal fighters had seized an airport in the former royal capital and were advancing on Kandahar.

Other anti-Taliban fighters reached the Afghan border post at the Torkham crossing to Pakistan at the western end of the fabled Khyber Pass, a Reuters cameraman said.

In the west, an anti-Taliban spokesman said opposition commander Ismail Khan entered the ancient city of Herat, his former powerbase, with 4 000 fighters at dawn Tuesday.

And in the southwest an anti-Taliban warlord said his forces had captured Nimruz province, which borders Iran.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said President George W Bush was "very pleased" with the progress of the war but believed it was "important for all parties to conduct themselves in a way that is consistent with human rights".

Amid reports of looting and killing by Alliance forces, Fleischer said that message had been delivered to them.

Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said US warplanes were attacking fleeing Taliban and troops of al Qaeda, bin Laden's guerrilla network.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush's closest ally in his war on terrorism, said plans for a successor government were well advanced and urged a UN presence in Kabul.

"We need urgently to put in place the next political and humanitarian moves that the changing military situation now permits," Blair said, shortly after talking by telephone with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Russia, which occupied Afghanistan for 10 years from !979 until it was forced out, hailed the fall of Kabul as an "important success" for the anti-Taliban coalition and also said a Afghan government should include all ethnic groups.

Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar urged his scattered fighters to stand and fight.

"I order you to completely obey your commanders and not to go hither and thither," the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) quoted him as saying to his troops in an address in the Pashto language over their wireless sets.

"Any person who goes hither and thither is like a slaughtered chicken which falls and dies. You should regroup yourselves, resist and fight."

Kabul residents, who harbour painful memories of bloody power struggles from the last time the Northern Alliance controlled the city, emerged from their homes on Tuesday morning to find the Taliban had gone.

"We have taken Kabul," shouted one jubilant fighter as he and fellow soldiers stood in a group on a street in the city centre on day 38 of the war.

Arab and Chechen fighters loyal to Bin Laden clambered into trees to fire on opposition troops.

They were shot and their bodies hung in branches or lay sprawled on the ground.

The Northern Alliance is deeply unpopular among Kabul's mainly Pashtun population due to power struggles among opposition leaders in the 1990s that unleashed almost daily rocket attacks on the city and killed about 50 000 residents. - Nampa-Reuters

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