BUL/JABAL-US-SARAJ (Islamweb & News Agencies) - Opposition forces in Afghanistan said Sunday they had destroyed the cream of the Taliban fighting force.They said they were driving ahead on three fronts and might seize the capital, Kabul, despite international pressure to stay out.
U.S. jets kept the pressure on Taliban forces outside Kabul, pounding the Islamic group for the 36th day as punishment for harboring Osama bin Laden, Washington's prime suspect in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said a series of bloody battles had left the last major Taliban force in the north surrounded in the city of Kunduz.
``The importance of this big defeat for the Taliban, dramatic defeat for the Taliban, is not only that they have lost large areas, but they have lost their main fighting force,'' Abdullah told a news conference.
He estimated the original Taliban force in the north at 15,000, including foreign units regarded as the most formidable. He said hundreds of Taliban, including many Pakistanis, had died in fighting around the main city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
The casualties, as with most details in the war in Afghanistan, were impossible to confirm independently.
Abdullah said a sudden collapse of Taliban forces had put Northern Alliance forces on the outskirts of Herat, the main city in western Afghanistan, and approaching Kabul after taking the town of Bamiyan, where the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddha statues earlier this year to international condemnation.
He said many fighters trapped in the north would find it impossible to escape -- they face the choice of trying to flee south through hostile territory and with U.S. war planes picking them off from the sky, or trying to get through the deadly chill of the Hindu Kush mountains, virtually impassable in winter.