Nov 17, 2001

First Major Battle of Retreating Arab Militants Waged Outside Kabul

By Kathy Gannon Associated Press Writer

PAGHMAN, Afghanistan (AP) - Several hundred Arab and Pakistani fighters waged a fierce battle with northern alliance soldiers in the rugged hills of Paghman, barely 12 miles outside the capital, witnesses and soldiers said Saturday

The battle two days ago was the first major ground assault on the Arabs and Pakistanis who fled with the retreating Taliban rulers at dawn Tuesday.

The fight was ferocious, said Khan Aga Jan, a northern alliance soldier aligned with the Ittehad-e-Islami faction of Abdur Rassool Sayyaf.

Several were killed and others were arrested, he said. The rest escaped to the mountains, Jan said, gesturing toward the stark, mud-brown range in the distance. "We are hunting them down," he said.

More than 200 Arab fighters of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida movement and their Pakistani allies took part in the battle, he said.

Before the Sept. 11 attacks and the U.S. airstrikes that followed, there were an estimated 10,000 foreign fighters in Afghanistan, most of them Arabs and Pakistanis. The others were Uzbeks, Chechens and fighters from Indonesia and the Philippines.

Several hundred al-Qaida members were headquartered in Paghman, many living in Sayyaf's abandoned home, according to Shamsul Haq, a resident who lived nearby. He and another resident, Sher Mohammed, independently described the battle.

Twenty of the Arabs had booby trapped their bodies, Haq said. With detonation devices in their hands, they dared their attackers to engage in hand-to-hand combat.

As the northern alliance troops attacked, the Arabs detonated the booby traps, killing themselves and their assailants, Haq said.

Sayyaf's support for the assault on Arab militants is an unusual change of heart for the rebel leader who sided with Iraq against the U.S.-led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War. Like bin Laden, he also has publicly opposed the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.

At his home in Paghman, Sayyaf refused to answer questions about the battle with the al-Qaida warriors or his long association with militant Arabs.

Sayyaf, who has stayed loyal to former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, was considered close to Arab militants fighting in Afghanistan. During the 1980s war against the Soviet occupation, Sayyaf's party had the largest number of Arabs in its ranks.

Documents shown to The Associated Press showed that Sayyaf had requested that Rabbani provide Afghan citizenship to 604 Arabs in 1993, according to the documents.

At the time, Sayyaf's lieutenant, Ahmed Shah Ahmedzai, was Rabbani's interior minister.

On Friday, Inayat Ullah, a former secretary for Ahmedzai, found several Afghan passports belonging to Arabs of al-Qaida as well as Yemeni passports in a safe house belonging to bin Laden's terrorist network.

AP-ES-11-17-01 1954EST

This story can be found at : http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA4XE556UC.html

-- Anonymous, November 17, 2001