The facts...Bagram, 25 miles north of Kabul as Taliban beef up
defences with its global extremists as a showdown
between Northern Allioance and Taliban is in the
making..
The air raids around Kabul so far have only targeted
one Taliban frontline position near Bagram, hitting
the strategic Mount Safi. On the key front at the
bombed-out airbase of Bagram, 25 miles north of Kabul,
Arab militants from bin Laden's al-Qaeda network are
arriving in convoy at night to form the first line of
Taliban forces, according to informants returning to
the opposition Northern Alliance headquarters.
The global core extremists of Al-Qaeda are forming
the front line in Bagram.
However US is reluctant to bomb so far, this
reluctance to strike in the area signals that the US
does not want the Northern Alliance to march on the
capital before it can. US does not want to wage
another war to flush out Northern Alliance. Taliban
realising this has moved the troops right to the front
so as avoid the attacks, the front is the safest
places so far.
The Taliban armoury is also understood to include
several hundred anti-aircraft missiles - including
Blowpipes secretly supplied by Britain to the
anti-Soviet mujahideen rebels during the 1980s - that
could bring down US and British helicopters.
The Taliban are reinforcing their forces around Kabul
in front of Bagram, Islamic extremists and adicals
from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Sudan and Chechnya
have been assigned a crucial role in the Taliban's
military operations. Bin Laden, the exiled Saudi
multi-millionaire accused of ordering the September 11
suicide attacks on America, is pooling the resources
of his terrorist operation with militia forces led by
his close friend, Mullah Mohamed Omar, the Taliban
supreme leader.
SEVERAL thousand fanatical Arab fighters have been
deployed as vanguard troops near Kabul and in northern
Afghanistan as Taliban commanders draw up plans for a
bloody fight against American ground forces and attack
helicopters.
The foreign troops were dispatched to the frontline
last week by Taliban leaders and their ally Osama bin
Laden. Their commanders believe that they are more
willing to sacrifice their lives and less likely to
defect than Afghan soldiers, many of whom are newly
conscripted youths.
"The Arabs have no choice: they must either stay and
defend Kabul or die. This is not their country and
they cannot run away. That is why the Taliban are
using them," said Gen Baba Jan, the alliance commander
at Bagram. "They don't trust their own Afghan
soldiers. They think they will defect."
Many of the senior commanders are Arab associates of
bin Laden, while students recruited from madrassas
(religious schools) comprised a significant chunk of
the Taliban's manpower even before the current crisis.
AMERICAN fighter-planes have began attacking Taliban
ground forces with cluster-bombs and laser-guided
bombs in daylight raids that confirmed their
domination of the skies above Afghanistan.
The close-up nature of the raids, which went on for
several hours in the morning and resumed at about 9pm
with virtually no ground fire, confirmed the
Pentagon's belief that, after almost a week of steady
pounding, Taliban air defences are close to being
knocked out.
Reports from inside the country said that American
jets were "flying at will" in the Afghan skies. But
front lines still remain very safe for the hardliners,
they are all escaping to the front from heart of the
command and control centers.
As the world's most sophisticated firepower rained
down on Afghanistan, the stand-off between Taliban
forces and Alliance troops resembled scenes from a
century ago. On the windswept Shomali Plain, where the
two sides have fought for five years over a few
hundred yards of rugged terrain, the stand-off is
typical. Less than half a mile and a bend in the river
separate identical-looking mud-and-stone villages
clinging precariously to the hillsides, but they are
on either side of what is now the world's hottest
frontline.
After suffering heavy military setbacks over the last
two years and the assassination of its military leader
Ahmed Shah Masood last month, the Northern Alliance is
in a poor position to launch an offensive without US
air support. Fighters scurried along mountainside
trenches dug by spade and fired off bursts of
automatic rifle fire at an enemy just a few hundred
yards away.
At Bagram, the two factions exchanged tank and
artillery fire under the gaze of young fighters
manning heavy machine guns in the pockmarked control
tower. Then, as dusk fell on Friday evening, Gen Jan,
a jovial portly 42-year-old, invited us to stay for
the night and follow the impact of American bombing
raids.
Through the tower's shattered windows, we watched as
the clear starry sky over Kabul was lit in the early
hours of yesterday by sharp white flashes from the
latest US air strikes, followed by orange bursts of
anti-aircraft fire.
Under thick woollen blankets pulled like shawls across
their fatigues and baggy tunics as protection against
the chill wind, Gen Jan's men watched the explosions.
Despite the bombardment, however, they are not
launching their own offensive as they remain heavily
outnumbered, with just 2-3,000 troops at Bagram
against a Taliban force that has just been
strengthened from 7,000 to 10,000.
In many places, the two sides are so close that they
swap pleasantries or trade insults by walkie-talkie.
In Kapisa, we sat cross-legged on cushions in the
commander's room as one of his men chatted to a
Taliban officer in Pashtu. "How are things?" asked the
Alliance fighter, an ethnic Tajik. "Fine. And you?"
came the good-humoured reply.
Elsewhere the exchanges are not so polite. "You are
not mujahid (holy warriors). You are the sons of
America," came the crackling message from Taliban
soldiers to the opposition troops crouched in trenches
dug out of shale on the mountains of the Ghurband
Valley. "You are the terrorists, the sons of bin
Laden," Abdul Khaliq radioed back.
Gen Jan believes that the US raids had struck their
intended military targets in and around the capital,
the impact was less than claimed as the Taliban had
moved men, tanks and artillery out of their bases to
camouflaged sites in woods and valleys in the run-up
to the offensive.The move came as there were
indications that the US was preparing to send in
special forces backed by Apache and Black Hawk
helicopters to pursue bin Laden.
Despite planning for a protracted war on terrorism,
Washington is keen to make rapid progress before the
weather worsens and to ease domestic pressure on
Pakistan, its reluctant ally.
Iqbal Latif
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