KABUL (Islamweb & News Agencies) - Taliban fighters stood defiant in their southern Afghan stronghold on Thursday, their leader vowing to destroy America as U.S. jets bombed from the sky, foes marched toward them across the desert and tribal elders offered surrender terms. But three days after the euphoria of Tuesday's dramatic entry into Kabul the Northern Alliance appeared at a loss at what to do next and U.N. envoys raced to gain entry to the capital to try to shape a government to fill the political vacuum.
And Washington said the net was tightening around Saudi-born millionaire militant Osama bin Laden, accused of masterminding the deadly September 11 hijack attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but they had yet to track down his Afghan lair.
Mullah Mohammad Omar -- the Taliban leader who lost an eye fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s -- breathed defiance despite 40 days of air strikes and pledged to destroy the United States.
His fighters made a stand in his powerbase, Kandahar, despite a withering U.S. aerial bombardment. But an escape route appeared when fellow Pashtuns from Afghanistan's biggest ethnic group said they would send in a peace delegation to offer surrender terms.
A LAST STAND AT KUNDUZ
In Kunduz, last redoubt of the Taliban in the north, thousands of fighters -- many of them Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens -- were under siege, the opposition said.``There are 20,000 Taliban in Kunduz, many of them Arabs, and they are trying to break out,'' said one Northern Alliance defense official in Dushanbe, the capital of neighboring Tajikistan.
``They are desperate, they've seen what happens to Arabs when the Northern Alliance gets hold of them,'' he said.
The claims could not be independently verified.
JALALABAD RETURN
The former governor of Afghanistan's eastern Nangahar province Haji Qadeer, a former mujahideen fighter whose brother Abdul Haq was executed by the Taliban on a mission inside Afghanistan last month, swept back to the palace from which he was evicted five years earlier by the Taliban.
He arrived in a convoy of vehicles from nearby Pakistan and appeared to have taken over from the Taliban.
``You are the people of Afghanistan, you are the sons of the soil, you are former mujahideen,'' he told a crowd of about 200 mujahideen -- holy warrior -- fighters at the governor's palace in the provincial capital, Jalalabad.
A day earlier, reports said another former mujahideen group, led by the anti-Western former Taliban ally Maulvi Yunus Khalis, had taken control of the eastern city of Jalalabad from the Taliban.