Taliban Leader To Fight To Death, Says Defector

KABUL, Monday - The Taliban’s supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar will fight to the death in Kandahar, his last bastion, rather than surrender to the US or Afghan rivals, a top defector said yesterday. “One point is clear. He knows that with or without a fight the Americans will kill him for sure,” Haji Mullah Khaksar (pictured far right), the Taliban’s former deputy interior minister, told Reuters. “He would reason that if the Americans are going to kill him or if he is going to die in jail, why shouldn’t he die in war?” he said. “It is and was in his character to fight to the death.” Khaksar, a known moderate in the leadership of the fundamentalist Taliban, stayed on when the Northern Alliance forces entered Kabul on November 13 on the heels of the Taliban retreat under the weight of U.S. air strikes. Speaking at his home in the Afghan capital, he said he had heard that the Islamic militia’s intelligence chief had defected in the town of Ghazni, south of Kabul, but had not been able to confirm it. Mullah Omar led the rise of the Taliban from the southern city of Kandahar, where he is now holed up with several thousand Taliban, Arab, Chechen and other foreign fighters. U.S. warplanes have kept up a sustained bombing of targets in and around the ancient walled city as ethnic Pashtun tribal fighters close in on the ground. Khaksar said the killing of some 600 Taliban and foreign fighters following a revolt at the Qali-i-Janghi fortress in northern Afghanistan after they had surrendered to the Northern Alliance would have stiffened resistance in Kandahar. “It became known to them that they will die and they decided to die rather than surrender,” he said. America launched its war on the Taliban on October 7 after Mullah Omar refused to hand over militant bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. Reuter Ends