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Posted on 11/13/2001 11:36:25 AM PST by JohnHuang2

KABUL, Nov 13 (Reuters) - Afghanistan's capital fell on Tuesday to the Northern Alliance whose troops marched in to the strains of music -- something not heard in five years -- and in defiance of international pressure.

"We have taken Kabul," shouted one jubilant fighter as he and fellow soldiers stood on a street in the city centre after the Taliban fled under cover of darkness.

The rout came on day 38 of the U.S. bombing campaign in response to the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, blamed on Osama bin Laden.

The fundamentalist militia, who have given safe haven to the Saudi-born militant, remained defiant, saying their retreat was a tactical move to save civilian lives. They vowed to fight back with guerrilla warfare.

Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar urged his scattered fighters to regroup and fight, Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) said.

Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, at his first news conference in Kabul, said his forces had entered Kabul to maintain security after the unexpected Taliban retreat, despite international appeals for them to wait.

The United Nations and all groups, except the Taliban, would be invited to Kabul for talks on a future government, he said.

But factions in the Northern Alliance split the city along ethnic lines within hours of their entry -- a sign Kabul could be reverting to the patchwork divisions that sparked power struggles and civil war when the same groups took over from the Soviet-installed government in 1992.

Northern Alliance leader and ousted president Burhanuddin Rabbani said he hoped to return. "God willing, tomorrow I will be in Kabul," he told Qatar's al-Jazeera satellite television.

Kabul's fall, in the pattern of its capture by the Taliban from the mujahideen in 1996, was sudden and almost bloodless.

In Shahr-i-naw park in the city centre lay the bodies of seven black-turbaned Taliban fighters, apparently executed with bullets to the head. Bank notes had been stuffed in their noses and ears and children spat on the corpses.

Young men lined up to have their beards shaved for the first time in five years and music played from loudspeakers, defying the draconian rules of a militia that imposed its interpretation of a 1,300-year-old Islamic Utopia on 20 million Afghans.

But residents were nervous. Shops were closed and pick-up trucks filled with anti-Taliban soldiers armed with Kalashnikov rifles and shoulder-held rocket launchers patrolled the streets.

"There was no option for us but to send our security forces into Kabul," Abdullah said, adding the alliance had some 6,000 security forces and troops around the capital.

He said 8,000 Taliban forces had pulled out of Kabul by about midnight on Monday.

TALIBAN RETREAT IN DARKNESS

The Taliban plundered Afghanistan's main currency market before fleeing in the night in a convoy of tanks, armoured personnel carriers and battered pick-up trucks, heading for their stronghold, the southern city of Kandahar.

They took with them eight Western aid workers -- two Americans, two Australians and four Germans -- facing charges of promoting Christianity.

"I order you to completely obey your commanders and not to go hither and thither," AIP quoted Omar as saying to his troops in an address in the Pashto language over their wireless sets.

"Any person who goes hither and thither is like a slaughtered chicken which falls and dies," warned the reclusive leader.

They were his first remarks since the Northern Alliance launched its blitzkrieg across north and west Afghanistan last Friday, climaxing with the fall of Kabul.

"You should regroup yourselves, resist and fight," he said,

Buoyed by the lightning capture of the north of the country over the weekend and supported by over a month of U.S. air strikes on the Taliban, the Northern Alliance broke through front lines outside Kabul on Monday.

By dawn, their fighters had raced into the city, waving their assault rifles. Residents greeted them with shouts of "Down with the Taliban!" and "Welcome the Northern Alliance!"

Crowds surrounded truckloads of soldiers, and threw plastic flowers onto tanks.

One Alliance commander, Gul Haidar, ordered his troops not to loot. "We should make sure that there is no problem for the people and no theft happens," he told his fighters.

At Bagram airport, north of Kabul, some of the U.S. special forces who coordinated the anti-Taliban lightning advance -- wearing civilian clothes and sunglasses and carrying M-16 assault rifles -- inspected Northern Alliance positions.

CONTROVERSY OVER KABUL

The United States allied with the alliance in fighting the Taliban to punish the militia for harbouring bin Laden.

But Washington had appealed to the alliance, made up mainly of minority Tajiks and Uzbeks, not to enter the capital.

The alliance is unpopular among Kabul's mainly Pashtun population due to power struggles among opposition leaders in the 1990s that unleashed almost daily rocket attacks on the city and killed about 50,000 residents.

Asked about the formation of a future Afghan government, Abdullah said the alliance invited the United Nations and all Afghan groups to send representatives to Kabul for talks. "Taliban excluded," he said.

The United States had wanted a broad agreement on the structure of any post-Taliban government before the alliance entered Kabul.

There have been few signs of progress on such a deal. The United Nations wants an urgent meeting of Afghan leaders.

In Rome, a senior adviser to Afghanistan's exiled former king, Zahir Shah, seen as a key player in the political future, said the Northern Alliance had broken an agreement with the monarch by entering Kabul.

"We wanted Kabul to be demilitarised and that the Kabul government and administration should come under a political process," Abdul Sattar Sirat told Reuters.

"He (Zahir Shah) can return to Afghanistan but only as an ordinary citizen," Rabbani told al-Jazeera television.

Within hours of the entry of the Northern Alliance, fighters loyal to Rabbani had taken over the centre while the Shiite Hezb-i-Wahdat group had taken the southwest, hinting at splits ahead, witnesses said.

HERAT FALLS, KANDAHAR TARGETED

In the west, veteran mujahideen commander Ismail Khan, accompanied by 4,000 fighters, entered his former powerbase -- the city of Herat -- at dawn, a spokesman said.

The triumphant return of the warlord known as the Lion of Herat came six years after he was toppled by the Taliban.

With Herat taken, the way was open for an advance on Kandahar, powerbase of the Taliban. Anti-Taliban tribal leader Hamid Karzai told Reuters by satellite phone the opposition had already taken the airport.

Opposition leaders said Kandahar could fall within 24 hours as moderate Taliban forces abandoned the hardliners.

The Taliban said it had strategically withdrawn from the areas lost.

Despite the opposition gains -- and a $5 million price on his head -- there was still no sign of bin Laden.

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