PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- The hardcore Taliban fighters in their last northern enclave of Konduz have agreed to surrender the city to the Northern Alliance on Sunday.
Announcing the agreement, an alliance official said Friday he hoped "the new understanding will help avoid the feared bloodshed in Konduz."
But despite the reported agreement, intensive fighting continued on the front. Within hours after the announcement, both sides resumed heavy artillery and rocket fires at each other.
The Northern Alliance continued to bring more tanks and heavy guns to the front to pound the Taliban positions.
U.S. B-52 bombers also joined the fight, targeting the Taliban hiding inside Konduz.
Observers described Friday as one of the busiest days in the weeklong siege of the northern city.
As journalists and alliance commanders watched, a convoy of 300 Taliban fighters raced toward the frontline, flying white flags.
They received a hero's welcome and surrendered to the alliance, agreeing to fight with them against the hardcore Taliban inside Konduz.
The alliance had earlier warned the Taliban fighters to lay down their arms by Friday morning or face the offensive but later extended the deadline.
Apparently ready to surrender, senior Taliban commanders in Konduz are refusing to abandon several thousand foreign fighters trapped in the city with estimated 12,000 Afghan soldiers.
Willing to allow a safe passage to the Afghan Taliban, the alliance treats the foreigners as war criminals and has vowed to punish them.
"Our forces have captured strategic hills overlooking Konduz which give us a good view of the enemy positions," said an alliance spokesman while commenting on the situation on the front. "This time there will be no turning back. Either the Taliban surrender on Sunday or face the consequences."
The latest attack on Konduz is led by an ethnic Tajik general of the Northern Alliance, Mohammed Dawood Khan, who has mobilized tanks, artillery and thousands of infantry to take the city by force.
But the region's most prominent commander, Gen. Rasheed Dostum, is still negotiating surrender with the Taliban forces.
On Wednesday, he brought a Taliban general, Mullah Fazil, to his stronghold of Mazar-i-Sharif to negotiate a deal. But less than an hour after Dostum said Fazil had agreed to lay down arms, Dawood Khan launched a major offensive on Taliban positions. His men were forced to retreat under heavy Taliban fire.
Reports indicate that both the generals want to enter Konduz first to seize the weapons the Taliban are believed to have stockpiled in the city. According to some alliance sources the Taliban have collected 120 tanks, 400 artillery pieces, more than 1,000 Soviet-built armored personnel carriers and thousands of rifles in Konduz.
But more important than the weapons are hundreds of Toyota pick-up trucks the Taliban maintain in the city. As winter sets in, the trucks will allow the captor to move his troops quickly over the mountainous terrain if and when needed.
Although now allied against the Taliban, Dostum and Tajik generals of the Northern Alliance have fought pitched battles against each other in the past.
Dostum is an Uzbek and his ethnic group is a minority in the Tajik-dominated north. The Tajiks claim that Dostum is trying to recruit the Taliban fighters in Konduz for his own army, which now controls Mazar-i-Sharif.
Most of the Taliban soldiers in Konduz belong to the Pashtun ethnic group, a majority in other parts of the country but a minority in the north. Konduz is the only Pashtun majority province in the north.
Before the Taliban captured Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998, Dostum had several Pashtun commanders from Konduz who helped him control an otherwise Tajik majority region.
As ethnic rivalries further complicate the power-struggle in the north, the Taliban have re-surfaced in a small town near the Afghan capital, Kabul, which they lost to the Northern Alliance on Nov. 13. They launched a counter-attack against alliance troops near the town of Maidan Shahr, forcing them to retreat in disorder. The alliance forces are now regrouping to flush out the Taliban forces from Maidan Shahr and the hills surrounding Kabul.
The Northern Alliance's Pashtun adversaries controlled these hills during its previous term, which ended in 1996 after the Taliban captured Kabul. The anti-alliance forces continued to pound Kabul from these hills throughout the three years the alliance ruled Kabul.
Meanwhile, U.S. jets resumed bombing Taliban positions all over Afghanistan after a brief lull to allow the Northern Alliance to negotiate the surrender in Konduz. U.S. officials said that 75 aircraft participated in the airstrikes during the past 24 hours.
In the southern Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, the religious militia is still determined to resist any move to oust it from the city. Taliban officials in Kandahar have repeated their pledge to fight till the bitter end.
Elsewhere in the south, the Taliban fighters are melting with the local tribes and seeking refuge in their native villages, hoping to fight the North Alliance once the U.S. strikes subside.
(Anwar Iqbal in Washington contributed to this report.)
