Afghanistan's Taliban leaders found themselves in the direct firing line of President George W. Bush's anti-terror coalition on September 26, as protesters torched the deserted US Embassy in Kabul.
With Bush focusing on security at home, Britain told the Taliban the coalition would treat them as its enemy if they did not hand over Washington's chief suspect in the September 11 suicide hijacking attacks on New York and Washington.
However, on the borders of Afghanistan itself, the United Nations (UN) and others in the humanitarian community focused on the plight of civilians there, and prepared for an exodus of up to 1.5 million frightened and hungry refugees.
Witnesses in Kabul said that thousands of angry Afghans, denouncing any attack over the Taliban's failure to hand over Saudi-born Muslim militant Osama bin Laden, had set fire to the US Embassy, abandoned in 1989.
Their action followed the latest salvo from the US-led coalition in what is still a war of words.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, firing that salvo on Tuesday, extended the coalition demand beyond bin Laden to members of other groups who have trained in Afghanistan.
The leader of Taliban turned to the American people, appealing for common sense in assessing whether his guest, the world's most wanted man Osama bin Laden, masterminded this month's suicide plane attacks.
While tens of thousands of Afghans were fleeing toward the borders of their landlocked country, fearing a US military attack in the hunt for bin Laden, those who support the purist Taliban were preparing to demonstrate their backing in the capital, Kabul.
Mullah Omar appealed to Americans yesterday to use their own judgement in responding to last week's devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, rather than blindly following their government's policy to attack his country.
"You accept everything your government says, whether it is true or false," Omar said in a messaged fax from his headquarters in the southern city of Kandahar.
Mullah Omar faces a delicate balancing act as the rising military threat could stir questions in Taliban ranks, especially about the wisdom of continuing to protect bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization from US demands for their destruction.
However, the Taliban has announced plans for war, ordering a mobilization of more than 300,000 men, and seizing food supplies from a UN warehouse intended for victims of a crippling drought that has exacerbated the country's woes.
In another development, Taliban and opposition fighters loyal to deposed President Burhanuddin Rabbani battled in the northern Balkh province yesterday.
General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a top opposition commander and long-time military leader of the Uzbek minority, said most of the fighting was concentrated around the Zari district, about 100 kilometres to the south of the strategic city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
Dostum drove the Taliban from Zari and a few other districts over the weekend but the Taliban has staged a counter-attack to block further advances by the opposition toward Mazar-i-Sharif.
( China Daily 09/27/2001)
