KABUL, Afghanistan?The alliance that controls Afghanistan’s capital and much of its countryside agreed Tuesday to attend power sharing talks in Germany next week. A battlefront commander claimed thousands of Taliban fighters had defected from Kunduz, the last bastion of the Islamic militia in the north.
On the front lines of northern Afghanistan, it was fast becoming a winter war. Outside Taliban-held Kunduz, shivering northern alliance soldiers thinned out from forward positions to huddle over fires in their foxholes.
Alliance Gen. Mohammed Daoud said thousands of Taliban have defected from Kunduz in recent days, and defectors’ own accounts indicate at least hundreds have fled since Sunday. Dozens of Taliban fighters defected Tuesday.
The day also brought a grim reminder of the chaos and danger pervading the Afghan hinterlands.
The bullet-ridden bodies of four international journalists?slain execution style by gunmen who pulled them from their cars on the road from Jalalabad to Kabul?were recovered by militiamen and identified by colleagues. Their deaths brought to seven the number of journalists killed covering the nearly 7-week-old conflict.
In the capital, Kabul, the northern alliance’s foreign minister, Abdullah, announced acceptance of a U.N. invitation to talks on setting up a broad based government to replace the Taliban.
The top U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, said talks would hopefully begin Monday in or near Berlin, with fewer than 30 participants from four different Afghan groupings.
He said he hoped the conference would take the groupings?”each one claiming to be fully representative of the whole of Afghanistan”?and unite them to choose a provisional administration.
“I very, very much hope that out of this meeting which is not, hopefully, only symbolic we will take some concrete decisions and steps,” Brahimi told reporters after briefing the U.N. Security Council.
The comment appeared to be in response to a statement earlier by the head of the northern alliance, Burhanuddin Rabbani, who grudgingly backed off his demand that the conference be held in Kabul, which he controls.
While agreeing to a meeting in Europe, Rabbani told CNN on Tuesday that such a gathering would only be “symbolic” and that he would still insist that the hard decisions on Afghanistan’s future be made in the country.
The Germany conference is open-ended. But Francesc Vendrell, Brahimi’s deputy, said at the press conference with Abdullah that it should be completed by Dec. 7. It is aimed at paving the way for a much larger grand council of Afghan groups, which would establish a new government.
Aside from the northern alliance, three other groups will attend the conference?all largely made up of Afghan exiles and all including Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group. The Taliban, whose leadership was mostly Pashtun, are excluded from the conference.
One delegation will be followers of former King Mohammad Zaher Shah. Also at the conference will be representatives of the so called Peshawar and Cyprus groups, which are made up of prominent Afghan figures.
The United Nations demands that the northern alliance?largely made up of ethnic minorities?share power with Pashtuns. It has been trying to find Pashtun representatives not closely linked to the Taliban.