ChicSunTimes

Suicide grenade kills 80 Taliban

December 2, 2001

BY DAVE NEWBART STAFF REPORTER

To 80 Taliban prisoners, death may have seemed the best fate.

The prisoners, kept in a freight container by their Northern Alliance captors, blew themselves up in an apparent mass suicide late Friday.

The incident in Sherberghan, near Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, will likely further stoke controversy over the treatment of war prisoners, particularly by men loyal to alliance commander Gen. Rashid Dostum.

Dostum's troops were involved in quashing a prison riot last week, also near Mazar-e-Sharif, and Dostum has a reputation for brutality.

Meanwhile, two Pashtun tribes made separate advances on the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar as the United States pounded Taliban targets in the area. One tribe was engaged in heavy fighting near the airport.

The United States also continued air strikes on tunnel networks in the mountains near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, leading to claims that bombing wiped out a village. Conflicting witness reports claim between 15 and 200 civilians were killed, but the United States denies hitting the village.

In other developments:

* Northern Alliance leaders submitted a list of names of candidates for an interim council that would take charge of the country until a national assembly could be held next year. The alliance also agreed to accept international peace monitors, a demand of the other three factions at the talks in Bonn, Germany.

* Technicians with the Environmental Protection Agency pumped poisonous gas into the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington early Saturday in an attempt to eliminate any remaining anthrax spores inside.

* A Canadian journalist was released by the Taliban and taken to Pakistan, where he was in good health.

Mass suicide

The prisoners who apparently committed suicide were captured after the fall of Kunduz and then held in a makeshift jail.

Friday afternoon, alliance soldiers heard a "loud rumble'' from inside the freight container, alliance commander Abdullah Ismail told the Sunday Telegraph.

"We opened it up to find that one or more of the Taliban had triggered an explosion inside,'' Ismail said. "It was a mess. There was stinking smoke, and the walls were smeared with flesh.''

Someone had set off a grenade, Ismail said.

Dostum's troops are holding an additional 6,000 soldiers. At the time of the alleged suicide, Dostum said he was hoping to enlist two Taliban leaders from Kunduz to persuade the prisoners to accept their defeat.

Talks progress

At United Nations-brokered talks Saturday in Germany, the Northern Alliance withdrew its resistance to international peace monitors and agreed to cede control to an interim council that would oversee Afghanistan until a national assembly could convene in March.

The alliance, particularly former Afghanistan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, had resisted both steps. But Saturday, after UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi spoke with Rabbani, the alliance bowed to pressure.

Its foreign minister, Abdullah, said the alliance was ''ready to transfer power to a transitional authority,'' even one that might not be headed by Rabbani.

''We think the results are promising,'' Abdullah said.

Southern fight

The fighting around Kandahar intensified as a column of U.S. Marines was seen heading for an unknown location after leaving a base set up near there just last week.

Fighters aligned with former Kandahar Gov. Gul Agha, a Pashtun, battled for control of the airport Saturday evening.

To the north of the city, thousands of fighters loyal to another Pashtun leader, Hamid Karzai, had moved to within 30 miles of Kandahar, according to Karzai's brother Ahmed. Ahmed Karzai said the Taliban had not engaged in battle with his brother's force.

The United States continued heavy air strikes on Taliban positions in Kandahar. One refugee who left the city said Taliban were hiding in the houses of residents.

''People think it's just like doomsday,'' Mohebullah, an Afghan refugee who reached Pakistan on Saturday, told the Associated Press. "They're in a terrible situation.''

Village bombed?

In the mountains south of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, officials believe more than 600 non-Afghan Taliban fighters and members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network could be hiding in caves.

The United States has heavily targeted the area, but witnesses claimed Saturday that early-morning raids wiped out the village of Kama Ado and killed between 100 and 200 civilians. The alliance defense chief in the province, Mohammed Zeman, agreed that the United States had missed its targets but said the number of casualties was 15 or 20.

But U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Brad Lowell said flatly, "It just did not happen.''

The United States admits bombing the area, but Pentagon images show the closest bomb struck 20 miles from the village, officials said.

At the Senate

Chlorine dioxide gas was pumped into the Senate office building starting early Saturday. It was routed through pipes into Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office suite in an attempt to kill off any anthrax that might have escaped Oct. 15 when Daschle's office opened a letter laced with the deadly substance.

Before the decontamination began, Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said it was unlikely that workers could remove every anthrax spore.

''This is new territory for both the EPA and certainly for us,'' Koplan said. "We haven't had this experience before as a country in how do you clean up a building like this.''

Contributing: Sun-Times wires

-- Anonymous, December 02, 2001