MAZAR-I-SHARIF - All Taleban forces in the besieged northern Afghan city of Kunduz have agreed to surrender, says a commander.
Mullah Mohammed Faizal was speaking in nearby Mazar-i-Sharif after talks with Northern Alliance leaders in which he and his colleagues agreed to give up fighting.
Late last night (NZ time), the anti-Taleban forces set a deadline of day's end for the Taleban fighters and foreigners allied with Osama bin Laden to hand over Kunduz or they would launch an all-out battle for the city today. nte
But Faizal said the 10,000 Taleban in the city, Afghans and foreigners, were under his control and all would give themselves up.
Talks were continuing to work out details of the surrender.
Kunduz is the strict Muslim militia's last redoubt in the north after its rout by Northern Alliance troops, backed by weeks of heavy United States bombing.
It would appear that Kunduz will fall without blood being spilled, but the leaders who have been holed up there are already steeped in it, writes Justin Huggler, of the Independent.
The two most senior commanders have been linked to one of the worst massacres that took place under the Taleban, during which a 16-year-old boy was skinned alive.
And a close ally of bin Laden, a Chechen warlord with a reputation for cutting the throats of Russian prisoners in public, has led the 1000 besieged al Qaeda fighters.
The Russians have accused the warlord, Omar al-Khatab, of triggering the 1999 war in Chechnya by invading the neighbouring Russian republic of Dagestan.
He is an ethnic Arab of Saudi and Jordanian descent, and is known for using car bombs.
When Faizil went to Mazar-i-sharif to meet the alliance's Uzbek warlord, General Rashid Dostum, to negotiate surrender, he travelled with al-Khatab and Mullah Daudullah, say Dostum's people.
But Faizil and Daudullah are far from blameless, as the ruins of the Afghan town Yakaolang testify.
In January this year, at least 178 people were tortured and killed by Taleban forces in Yakaolang, a district of Bamiyan province, according to a 55-page report, including witness accounts, prepared by the United Nations.
One of the victims was a 16-year-old boy skinned alive "from head to chest". His body was dumped behind the offices of the British charity Oxfam.
Witnesses interviewed by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan describe unarmed civilians being lined up and their hands tied.
They were then shot in the back.
Many were apparently killed by foreign fighters, possibly members of al Qaeda.
Arab fighters carried long knives used for slitting throats and skinning victims, the witnesses said.
Faizil is named in the UN report as the man in command of the massacre.
The report also says that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taleban's supreme leader, was in constant contact by radio with Taleban forces in Yakaolang while the massacres were being carried out.
Daudullah, the next most senior Taleban in Kunduz, has also been accused of involvement in atrocities at Yakaolang.
Human Rights Watch says he is known to have been in command of Taleban troops who committed a second "mopping-up operation" only six months later.
Then, Taleban forces returned to the town and burnt it to the ground.
Daudullah's forces then went on the rampage through Bamiyan province, burning the tents of refugees who had fled into the mountains, and killing even the elderly who had stayed behind. Most were Shia Muslims. The Taleban are Sunnis.
- INDEPENDENT, REUTERS
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Taleban agree to surrender northern city
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