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Thursday, November 15, 2001 - Web posted at 9:45:03 am GMT

ANTI-TALIBAN forces claimed further dramatic victories Wednesday with the hard-line Afghan Islamists' final stronghold of Kandahar reported to have fallen as Washington prepared for a "needle in a haystack" hunt for Osama bin Laden.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who on Tuesday revealed that US Special Forces were already operating in southern Afghanistan, said finding those responsible for September's mass killings on US soil remained a difficult task despite Taliban losses.

The anti-Taliban Northern Alliance ambassador in neighbouring Tajikistan said Kandahar, the Taliban's power centre, had fallen to the opposition and tribal rebels.

"Today the forces of the Northern Alliance entered Kandahar," ambassador Said Ibrahim Hikmat said.

Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah earlier told Iran's state television: "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."

The claims could not be independently verified but, if true, they would represent an enormous setback for the Taliban and the al Qaeda network of their guest Bin Laden, blamed for the Sept 11 attacks with hijacked airliners in New York and Washington.

They followed the Northern Alliance's seizure of the capital Kabul and the domino-like fall or defection of towns and provinces that reduced the Taliban's control from 90 per cent of the country to 20 per cent in just five days.

International diplomats, outpaced by opposition victories in the field, galloped to keep up with the military advances as they sought to set up a broad-based government able to satisfy Afghanistan's neighbours and avoid an ethnic bloodbath.

In Kabul, the Northern Alliance, has refrained so far from the orgy of reprisal killings and bloody power battles among its disparate factions that accompanied its last takeover in the early 1990s.

But military analysts expected the Taliban, aided by al Qaeda, to take to Afghanistan's impenetrable mountains in a guerrilla war reminiscent of the hit-and-run campaigns that drove the occupying Soviet army from the country in 1989.

Experts on Afghanistan said the Taliban's collapse boosted US prospects for hunting down Laden.

"The chances of him being betrayed, sold out or whatever are extremely high," Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid told Reuters from the Pakistani city of Lahore.

"There is tremendous ferment across the south now," said Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who has covered Afghanistan for 20 years and whose book on the Taliban has topped bestseller lists around the world for weeks.

"People are turning against the Taliban and there have been defectors from the Taliban who can be interviewed for a mine of information and intelligence on where Bin Laden is."

In other battlefield developments, an anti-Taliban group seized control of the eastern city of Jalalabad, an area which housed al Qaeda training camps, Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press said.

Four northeastern provinces also slipped from Taliban hands after local uprisings, officials and tribal leaders said.

World leaders were trying to assemble a multinational peacekeeping force and plans for a transitional government for a country racked by civil war since the former Soviet Union invaded on Christmas Day, 1979, to back communist rule in the Muslim country.

British troops could be sent to Afghanistan within days to maintain security as part of a stability force, said rime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush's staunchest ally in his war on terrorism.

"The main purpose of these troops would be in the context of multinational efforts to make safe the humanitarian supply routes now opening up as a result of military progress," Blair said.

Diplomats were converging on Afghanistan's southern neighbour, Pakistan, to hammer out post-Taliban rule. - Reuters

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