KABUL - The Northern Alliance was under mounting pressure yesterday to form a broad-based government in Afghanistan as four more journalists were feared killed in the US-led anti-terror campaign, now in its seventh week.

As the last two major pockets of Taliban resistance in the country negotiated their surrender, international interest in Afghanistan drew increasingly testy responses from the new masters of Kabul, flush from a series of military victories that ended their Taliban foes’ five-year hold on power.

The collapse of the Taliban as a political force was confirmed by Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar, who said Monday that Islamabad no longer recognised the militia government, although it maintains diplomatic ties.

The country was far from safe, with four journalists feared killed yesterday on the road from the eastern town of Jalalabad to Kabul.

Travellers on a bus plying the road said they saw four bodies, including at least three foreigners, one of them a woman, by the roadside.

At the same time, the Reuters news agency said it had lost contact with a TV cameraman and a photographer.

Italy's Corriera della Sera newspaper said it had no news from correspondent Maria Grazia Cutuli and Spain's El Mundo said reporter Julio Fuentes was missing.

The driver and passengers of the bus said they saw the bodies 90 km east of Kabul.

There was no immediate indication as to who may have carried out the attack, but there have been reports of bandits and rogue Taliban elements in the area.

If confirmed, the number of reporters killed in the conflict will stand at seven after the deaths last week of two French radio journalists and a German photographer in a Taliban ambush near Taloqan, northern Afghanistan.

Taliban fighters besieged in the northern city of Kunduz offered a conditional surrender, meanwhile, and a peaceful transition of power was reportedly under negotiation in the Taliban's southern stronghold of Kandahar.

In Washington, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said the United States had increased its military presence in southern Afghanistan and now had "a few hundred" special forces in the country.

Grumblings began Sunday among Alliance leaders as they outlined the limits of further foreign military presence in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

UN envoy Francesc Vendrell was to meet Burhanuddin Rabbani, the UN-recognised president of Afghanistan ousted by the Taliban five years ago, to discuss a planned inter-Afghan conference.

Rabbani and the Northern Alliance hold most of the cards following the Taliban's dramatic collapse - and they are playing them close to the chest.

Since re-entering Kabul on Saturday, Rabbani has sought to dispel fears that his return could lead to a repetition of the civil strife and corruption that marked his previous reign, from 1992 to 1996.

The Northern Alliance, of which Rabbani is the nominal head, is a loose coalition of Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and other minorities; their last experience in power under Rabbani resulted in a bloody civil war that devastated Kabul.

The country's Pashtun majority is currently represented by the Taliban, and US and UN officials hope former Afghan king Mohammed Zahir Shah, a Pashtun, can play a unifying role despite his 87 years - 28 of them in exile.

The top Taliban commander in Kunduz, Mullah Fazil, saying US air strikes had killed more than 1 000 people in and around the northern city over the weekend, offered to surrender - but only under UN supervision.

Estimates of the number of besieged troops at Kunduz run between 20 000 and 30 000, about one-third of them foreigners - including Pakistanis, Arabs, Uzbeks and Chechens - linked to Bin Laden's al Qaeda organisation.

In Kandahar, the other major pocket of Taliban resistance, militia commanders were reported negotiating with tribal leaders for a peaceful handover of power. - Nampa-AFP