Author: Kathy Gannon
Publication: The Times of India
Date: December 1, 2001
It was 6 p.m. on Monday, November
12. The U.S. bombing had been punishing. The fighting outside Kabul was
intense. In the capital, the Taliban decided it was time to go.
The Islamic militia's hierarchy
in the capital called the decisive meeting. About a dozen men in turbans
and beards gathered in the dimly lit sitting room of Mullah Mohammed Hassan,
the Taliban prime minister and second-most powerful man in the religious
movement.
Their situation was pressing. Less
than 10 km away, American bombs were blasting Taliban defences, and Northern
Alliance tanks were being ordered to encircle the city.
What unfolded next was recounted
in detail in a recent interview by Mullah Mohammed Khaqsar, a Taliban official.
He said that he was called to the meeting by a leadership that didn't know
he had been in secret contact with the Northern Alliance for months.
Publicly, the Taliban were defiant,
vowing to fight to the death to defend the capital they had held for five
years. But behind the bravado, Taliban government ministers had already
been planning their escape, Khaqsar said.
Days before, they had quietly stacked
old couches, beds, and other furniture onto trucks and sent them south
towards Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold.
Shortly after sunset, key Taliban
figures gathered at Hassan's house in the Wazir Akbar Khan district. Interior
Minister Abdul Razzak was there along with Khaqsar, his deputy. So were
Qadratullah Jamal, the culture and information minister, and Mullah Mohammed
Abbas, the health minister.
Also present was Abbas' deputy,
Sher Mohammed Stanikzai, a small man with a wispy black beard who spoke
perfect English and was often put forward by the Taliban to talk to Western
visitors.
The decision was taken by consensus,
Khaqsar said - the Taliban would leave Kabul by night. The leaders agreed
to meet again four hours later at a small place called Durrani in Wardak
province south of Kabul, Khaqsar said.
There was no time to waste. Ethnic
Tajik troops from the Northern Alliance were advancing from the north;
a Shiite Muslim faction was coming from the southwest. The mullahs had
to make sure they would get past the town of Maidan Shahr, capital of Wardak
province about 32 km south of Kabul, before the Shiites cut the escape
route. Khaqsar said the Arab allies from Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida movement
were not present at the Kabul meeting. He said their leaders had gathered
separately for a meeting with a representative of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a
former ally of the U.S. in the war against the Soviets in the 1980s.
"Haqqani was in charge of the Arabs
and it was this man who told them to leave Kabul," Khaqsar said.
Initially, plans called for the
Taliban and Al-Qaida, to establish new front lines to the south and southwest
of Kabul - at Durrani and at Sang-e-Nowishta. Once the decision was taken,
the mullahs left, to spread the word that it was time to leave the city.
Taliban leaders began heading out of the capital shortly after the meeting
broke up.
Those who had already shipped their
personal belongings drove straight from Mullah Hassan's house to the road
out of town, Khaqsar said.
When word trickled to the front
line that the leaders were leaving, fighters clambered aboard trucks to
join the escape. Some even drove away in their tanks.
As the Taliban left, they ran into
intense American airstrikes, Khaqsar said. The fallback front quickly collapsed,
and by I am, seven hours after the Kabul meeting, the Taliban were scattered
and fleeing farther south and southwest. The next morning the Northern
Alliance entered Kabul.
The whereabouts of other officials
at the last meeting in Kabul are not known, making it impossible to obtain
firsthand corroboration of Khaqsar's account. But it is detailed, and some
of its details correspond with what is known about that night. (AP)
