Taliban Fleeing Last Strongholds; 8 Aid Workers Are Flown to Safety

WASHINGTON —  Opposition forces claimed control of nearly all of Afghanistan on Wednesday amid signs that Taliban soldiers had fled to the hills to prepare for the kind of guerrilla warfare they once waged against Soviet troops.

U.S.-backed Northern Alliance forces battled their way toward the Taliban’s remaining enclaves of Kunduz in the north and Kandahar in the south.

Newly active opposition forces from the dominant Pushtun ethnic group--from which the Taliban had drawn most of its support--opened a new front and reportedly seized the airport in Kandahar. Pentagon officials said intelligence reports appeared to confirm that Kandahar was under siege and that many Taliban fighters had left.

Early today, U.S. helicopters whisked eight foreign aid workers who had been held by the Taliban to safety in Pakistan. The eight, including two Americans, were picked up in a field about 50 miles south of Kabul.

Adding to the Taliban’s woes, Pentagon officials said that U.S. bombs struck a building where Taliban leaders had gathered earlier this week. But they did not say whether Osama bin Laden was among those in the building when it was hit.

“There was a target with a significant number of leadership,” a Defense Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

At a Pentagon briefing, Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem, a senior official with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: “Anti-Taliban opposition groups in southern Afghanistan are rebelling against Taliban control, especially near Kandahar. There are a number of tribes--Pushtun tribes in the south--who would appear now to be opposing the Taliban.”

Some local Taliban leaders reportedly defected to the opposition. But others sped off in provision-laden pickup trucks, heading toward the mountains that have concealed Afghan guerrillas for decades, Kandahar residents said.

If opposition forces capture and hold Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual center, that could mark the end of the ground war in Afghanistan, military analysts said. On Tuesday, the Northern Alliance swarmed into the Afghan capital, Kabul.

As the alliance’s soldiers and police units kept order in the streets of Kabul on Wednesday, its officials took over key government offices, such as the Foreign and Interior ministries. The alliance insists that it wants to share power in a broad-based government, but it isn’t waiting to assert its authority.

Once the country is in anti-Taliban hands, the U.S. campaign is likely to turn into a manhunt for Bin Laden and other leaders of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, who are believed to be bivouacked in Afghanistan’s countless hills and caves. As the Pentagon seeks out other Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, military officials say lumbering B-52 bombers would be grounded in place of lighter F-15E fighter jets, A-10 Warthogs and Apache helicopters.

“It is . . . gratifying to see the Taliban fleeing and the people of Afghanistan getting their country back,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said during a visit to the site of the World Trade Center in New York, which was destroyed along with part of the Pentagon in the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks that prompted the war. “On the other hand, our task is to find the Al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership, and we still have that ahead of us.”

While Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney warned that a long campaign against terrorism lies ahead, other officials found it hard to restrain their enthusiasm.

“It would appear to us that they are abandoning the cities that they previously had control over,” Stufflebeem said of the Taliban. “It’s not clear exactly why they may be doing that. It may be that they are regrouping. It may be that they are abandoning and retreating.”

Yet British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared the Taliban in “total collapse,” and even Cheney departed from his cautious tone long enough to pronounce the Taliban “in retreat” throughout the country.

“They’ve lost their control over a major part of Afghanistan, they’ve lost control of most of the cities,” the vice president said. “Many of their forces have been killed, captured or fled to the hills.”

The momentum in the 5½-week-old war shifted toward the opposition late last week when the Northern Alliance seized the northern crossroads town of Mazar-i-Sharif. Its fighters then swept across the northern half of the country and captured Kabul on Tuesday, outpacing political efforts to craft a post-Taliban government. The seizure of Kunduz, where lingering Taliban forces were surrounded by the Northern Alliance and cut off from reinforcements, appeared likely.

Until Wednesday, the U.S. had lacked a proxy army of Pushtuns, who dominate southern Afghanistan, to extend the gains of the Northern Alliance, which is composed primarily of ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. That changed when Pushtun tribesmen moved on Kandahar.

“There is a rout. That is exactly what’s going in Afghanistan,” said William Taylor, a former Army colonel now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It’s all over on the military map. . . . Now comes the hard part.”

The apparent collapse of the Taliban in its southern stronghold began with intense fighting near Kandahar, said Mohammed Ibrahim Ghafoori, a Northern Alliance spokesman in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.

“The airport has been captured, and there are some reports that the city has been taken as well,” Ghafoori said Wednesday. “I am not sure if our forces are in control yet, but I hope they will be by tomorrow.”

Reports from Kandahar were contradictory, and claims that the city had fallen could not be independently confirmed. Details were sketchy in part because phone lines were destroyed by the U.S. bombing campaign.

Soldiers loyal to Gul Agha Shirzai, the former governor of Kandahar, appeared to have taken up positions in the hills to the east of the airport, said Bariallai Hillai, a businessman from the western province of Farah who stopped in Kandahar on his way to the Pakistani border city of Quetta. That account was supported by Ayub Tareen, a reporter for the BBC, who was in touch with people in Kandahar.

There were conflicting reports about whether Shirzai himself had reached Kandahar. He left Quetta late Tuesday and was headed for Kandahar with about 800 supporters.

Also reported to be in the Kandahar area was Hamid Karzai, a Pushtun leader who entered the country in early October to foment an anti-Taliban rebellion among southern tribesmen. It appeared likely that negotiations were underway between the Taliban and the anti-Taliban forces about the terms of a change in power.

In an interview with the BBC, the Taliban consul in Quetta, Maulana Abdullah Hamad, said the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, was in Kandahar, bringing a message to the Taliban there.

Elsewhere, the tide appeared to turn more dramatically. Local warlords from the provinces of Herat and Helmand joined in the battle on the side of the Northern Alliance, Ghafoori said.

“They have hated the presence of the Taliban and they have started an uprising,” he said.

Northern Alliance commanders have urged the international community to flood the region with aid before winter. The United Nations moved its first barge across the river dividing Uzbekistan from Afghanistan in what U.N. officials said they expect will become a massive effort to help more than 3 million Afghans at risk of malnutrition or starvation.

The barge was loaded with 50 tons of wheat, and blankets and clothing. The United Nations eventually hopes to move three to five such barges a day.

In Britain, Blair attributed the military success in large part to the “targeted bombing” carried out by the United States with Britain’s assistance.

“It is clear that support for the Taliban is evaporating,” he said. “Though there may be pockets of resistance, the idea that this has been some sort of tactical retreat is just the latest Taliban lie. They are in total collapse.”

Hendren reported from Washington and Reynolds from Termez, Uzbekistan. Times staff writers Rone Tempest in Islamabad, Pakistan; Alissa J. Rubin in Quetta; Marjorie Miller in London; Paul Watson in Kabul; and Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson in Herat contributed to this report.