KABUL/WASHINGTON (REUTERS) — The Taliban’s supreme leader Wednesday urged his forces to stand and fight as U.S. Marines poured into a secret base in Afghanistan, and the CIA said one of its officers had been killed, the first American to die in the ground campaign to hunt down Osama bin Laden.
Pinned by American bombing, in the sights of the Marines and under assault from Afghan tribal foes, the fundamentalist Taliban were trapped in their southern stronghold of Kandahar, but their supreme leader forbade surrender.
“Don’t vacate any areas,” said Mullah Mohammad Omar, who is being targeted for harboring bin Laden, whom Washington blames for the Sept. 11 attacks that killed more than 3,900 people.
“This is not a question of tribes,” Omar was quoted as saying in a radio message. “This is a question of Islam.”
At U.N.-sponsored talks in Bonn, Germany, progress was reported between the Northern Alliance and backers of former Afghan King Zahir Shah on the broad outlines of a mechanism to share power in a post-Taliban government.
The proposed accord, which would be the first concrete step toward a wider agreement on a broad-based government made at the U.N.-sponsored talks, came after a day of official warnings not to expect much progress.
On the battlefront, the U.S.-backed Alliance forces said they had taken back control of a fortress near the northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif, where up to 600 captured fighters belonging to bin Laden’s al Qaeda may have been killed in a revolt put down by U.S. bombing and fierce ground attacks.
The CIA said that in the firefight Johnny Micheal “Mike” Spann, 32, who worked for the agency’s clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations, was killed and that he “was where he wanted to be: on the front lines serving his country.”
Another CIA officer working with Spann, who was armed, managed to escape alive from the riot.
A fresh batch of several dozen troops from the U.S. 10th Mountain Division, trained to fight in rugged terrain, joined Marines on the ground in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said. CNN reported they would guard the airport at Mazar-i-Sharif.
U.S. FORCES TARGET ENEMY LEADERSHIP
A U.S. defense official said Taliban troops were “digging furiously” through debris of a leadership compound in southern Afghanistan shattered by U.S. bombs, “an indication to us of the success of the strikes.” There was no evidence, however, that senior Taliban or al Qaeda officials died there.
In Islamabad, a spokesman for the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, said Mullah Omar was still alive. The Taliban have said bin Laden is not in territory under their control.
The Pentagon said now its aim was to go after top leaders.
“Any time you can dismantle the leadership or this chain of command, you then have groups of troops who are uncoordinated and uncontrolled and therefore much less
effective,” Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem told reporters.
Significant numbers of senior officials of Afghanistan’s Taliban, including the head of military intelligence and at least two government ministers, have defected and are now in Pakistan, CBS Evening News said Wednesday.
