Taliban Flee Afghan Capital

Nov. 13, 2001 -- The Northern Alliance took control of the Afghan capital of Kabul today amid scenes of jubilation as the Taliban fled south in the pre-dawn hours.

Northern Alliance soldiers met with little resistance as they entered Kabul, although reporters entering the city with alliance troops said there were incidents of looting and some Pakistani and Arab soldiers fighting for the Taliban were summarily shot.

But civilians were unharmed and the capture was relatively peaceful, reporters said.

Although President Bush had in the past urged the alliance not to take the capital until a plan for a coalition government to rule the fractious country was completed, he hailed the recent events as "great progress."

At a joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he urged the rebels to acknowledge that a future government must represent "all of Afghanistan," and to "respect the human rights of the people they are liberating."

Meanwhile. military leaders also warned against premature declarations of victory. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters at a press briefing at the Pentagon, "this effort against terrorism and terrorists is far from over."

Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff said: "The al Qaeda terrorist organization remains dangerous and our overall campaign objective remains to destroy al Qaeda and break the Taliban's hold on Afghanistan."

Amid almost euphoric scenes of Kabulis blasting radios, shaving beards and noisily ringing bicycle bells down the streets of the capital, the alliance established what it said was a police force of 6,000, which reporters on the scene described as uniformed men patrolling the city with machine guns mounted on pickup trucks.

In an attempt to allay international concerns that the capital was taken before a political solution for the future of Afghanistan had been reached, Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said the alliance was not an occupying force.

Speaking to reporters in Kabul, where Northern Alliance troops now occupy government buildings, Abdullah invited U.N. representatives into Kabul along with other Afghan groups — "Taliban excluded" — for discussions on the country's future administration.

A Power Vacuum

But while the mood in Kabul has been victorious, the international community, caught off guard by the speed of the Taliban's unraveling, has been moving to fill the potentially dangerous power vacuum in the war-ravaged country.

U.N. officials are expected to meet with representatives of Afghan groups in the coming days and diplomats from the United States, Russia and Afghanistan's six neighbors have been rushing to patch together a multi-ethnic power-sharing government in Kabul.

Author Sebastian Junger, on a special assignment for ABCNEWS inside Afghanistan, reported that a delegation of elders from Kabul, fearing a complete lack of security in the capital, met with Northern Alliance leaders outside the city late Monday and asked the alliance to enter Kabul and establish a security force in the capital.

But Afghanistan's former king, Zahir Shah, accused the Northern Alliance of reneging on an agreement not to enter the capital.

"We wanted Kabul to be demilitarized and that the Kabul government and administration should come under a political process," said a senior adviser to Shah in Rome, where the former king has lived in exile since his ouster in 1973.

Responding to Shah's criticism, a Northern Alliance envoy in London said the coalition of anti-Taliban fighters hoped the former king would send a team to Kabul for political talks.

In an interview with the pan-Arabic television channel in the United Arab Emirates, Burhanuddin Rabbani, who served as Afghanistan's president until the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, said Shah could return from exile to Afghanistan, "but only as anordinary citizen."

On his part, Shah has repeatedly stated that he had no intention of re-establishing the monarchy in Afghanistan.

Despite the power vacuum in the capital, reporters said the atmosphere in Kabul was relatively quiet considering the quick changes in the city.

Kabulis were seen celebrating by engaging in simple practices banned by the Taliban: shaving, listening to music and ditching their required turbans.

However, news agencies reported that few women were ready to abandon their all-covering burqas, despite being encouraged to do so.

Retreating Taliban Troops

After five weeks of a U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan, the fall of Kabul came astonishingly quickly with Taliban troops retreating towards the southern city of Kandahar, where the hard-line group has enjoyed the ethnic support of the majority Pashtun tribesmen.

The Taliban are believed to have taken the contents of Kabul's banks and money markets with them.

However, there were also reports of Northern Alliance soldiers making strong headway toward Kandahar.

Reporters arriving with the Northern Alliance in Kabul were shown the rooms where eight international aid workers had been held for weeks by the Taliban on charges of proselytizing. Witnesses said the Taliban took the aid workers to Kandahar.

Pentagon officials told ABCNEWS that while the United States was engaged in bombing Taliban troops heading toward Kandahar, U.S. officials said they had a good idea of the location of the aid workers.

Officials also said extra AC-130 gunships were being brought into the area for their ability to monitor the roads and react quickly. They added that the United States has put more special operations troops into southern Afghanistan, specifically to look for Osama bin Laden.

"I think what we are going to see now for several weeks and possibly months is a great ferment and military action in the south," Ahmed Rashid, author of the book Taliban, told ABCNEWS. "What hopefully we are going to see now is humanitarian relief, aide workers coming in feeding the Afghan population and the start of a process to set up a new Afghan government."

Reports of Looting and Retribution Killings

As Northern Alliance troops rolled into Kabul, reporters said most of the anger appeared to be directed at foreigners, especially Pakistani and Arab mercenaries fighting for the Taliban.

While Pakistani sympathizers of the Taliban are widely expected to slip back into Pakistan, there were concerns about the fates of many Arab mercenaries fighting for the Taliban.

Although the capture of Kabul from the Taliban after five years of a repressive administration was relatively peaceful, there were reports of looting of international warehouses during the early hours of the capture.

U.N. spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker in Islamabad, Pakistan, said the Northern Alliance troops seized a U.N. aid convoy and looted one of its warehouses.

The reports, if true, give more credence to concerns about what a Northern Alliance victory could mean for Afghanistan, if there is no broad-based coalition in place to attempt to maintain order should the Taliban regime fall.

The Northern Alliance has set up checkpoints at major crossroads in Kabul, where security forces were confiscating goods looted earlier today. But in an ominous warning of the fragility of the situation in Kabul, Reuters reported that fighters loyal to former President Rabbani had taken over the center of the city and the Shiite Hezb-i-Wahdat group had occupied the southwest.

If true, the situation in Kabul could come dangerously close to the anarchic years following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, when the capital was plunged into years of an internecine civil war until the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996.

The Kabul office of Qatar-based Al Jazeera television took a direct hit from a U.S. bomb overnight. The building was destroyed, but the staff had already left building.

In the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, the Taliban's only foreign embassy was shut down as the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, left his residence this morning for an unknown location. According to Reuters, the embassy's staff later drove away in minivans and four-wheel drive vehicles, leaving the building empty.

Six-Plus-Two Discusses Future of Afghanistan

During the past few days, Pakistan has maintained its opposition to a Northern Alliance occupation of Kabul, calling instead for the city to remain a demilitarized enclave under the control of a U.N. peacekeeping force or a multinational force.

Speaking at news conference in Islamabad today, Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan maintained a "broad-based multi-ethnic representative dispensation, acceptable to all Afghans, and at peace with all its neighbors, established under the auspices of the United Nations, would be the best guarantee for peace in Afghanistan as well as for its unity and territorial integrity."

Pakistan is an integral part of what is commonly called the "six-plus-two, " a loose alliance of Afghanistan's six neighbors plus Russia and the United States that is currently holding talks to decide on the future of Afghanistan.

Representatives of the United States, Russia, China, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan met Monday at the United Nations in New York and after 90 minutes of talks issued a declaration endorsing the efforts of the U.N. envoy for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, to create a consensus among the country's diverse ethnic groups.

"We have always been aware that when you get into these kinds of operations, things can move very fast, and sometimes can get stuck," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said. "We have to be nimble. We have to be able to move quickly, and we have to be flexible."

But even as the international community discusses a future for Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban, the private Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press reported that Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar today urged his scattered fighters to regroup and fight.

Omar remains in the stronghold city of Kandahar and U.S. officials say the Taliban continue to surround Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks, and provide critical support for his al Qaeda operations. More than 4,500 people were killed in attacks in the United States.

World Reacts to News

In other developments:

Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the United States for talks with President Bush. Russia has hailed the fall of Kabul as an "important success" for the Northern Alliance.

The governments of Britain and France have called upon the United Nations to take an active role in filling the power vacuum currently in Afghanistan. British Prime Minister Tony Blair today said a U.N. presence was required in Afghanistan "as soon as possible."

Brahimi, the U.N. envoy for Afghanistan, is expected to brief the U.N. Security Council later today. Brahimi said he hoped"a representative sampling" of the Afghan population could meetwithin days to work out arrangements to replace the Taliban.

A U.N. spokeswoman in Pakistan said more than 100 Taliban hiding in a school in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif were killed after the Northern Alliance captured the city last week.

The latest numbers of victims from the attacks on the World Trade Center, according to New York City officials, are 3,748 missing presumed dead and 556 identified dead. In addition, officials say 233 people are dead or missing at other Sept. 11 terrorism sites, for a total of 4,537 presumed dead in the attacks.

ABCNEWS' David Wright and John McWethy contributed to this report.