Taliban forces yesterday tightened their grip on northern Afghanistan, smashing through defence lines to capture a second key opposition stronghold in a dawn attack, independent sources said.
Aid sources said troops of the anti-Taliban alliance loyal to the former defence minister, Mr Ahmad Shah Masood, pulled out of his crucial north-eastern supply town of Taloqan after the lightning offensive.
The sources said Taliban troops met little resistance entering the town, the key base through which most of Mr Masood's supplies travel, and have secured control of major intersections and buildings.
Mr Masood's forces left the city following a brief spate of looting, they added. They were uncertain whether the pullout was a full withdrawal or a tactical retreat.
The Afghan Islamic Press in Islamabad also reported the city's fall, which comes after the Taliban on Saturday captured the northern bastion of Mazar-i-Sharif, 225 km to the west of Taloqan. The fall of Taloqan was also confirmed in the Tajik capital by a diplomat at the Afghan embassy, representing the ousted government in exile, and by the official Iranian news agency IRNA in Tehran.
Taloqan is just 150 km south of the Tajik border and is north of Mr Masood's Panjshir valley stronghold from where he is battling the Taliban on frontlines north of Kabul. Two of his supply routes have now been cut and the third is only open for part of the year and passable on foot or by donkey.
Mazar-i-Sharif had been the last major city outside Taliban control. The militia yesterday stepped up efforts to flush out and disarm remnants of the resistance in the city. Sources said the Taliban had imposed a 24-hour curfew on the city of 500,000 residents with street patrols.
The Taliban said yesterday it could put Iranians captured in the city on trial on charges of spying as they had not been registered as diplomats.
The Taliban foreign ministry was reacting to Iran's charge that Taliban forces had detained 11 of its diplomats and a correspondent of the official news agency IRNA.
Meanwhile, a former prime minister, Mr Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, spoke on Iranian state radio from Afghanistan yesterday to contradict rumours he had been killed.
"As you hear me here today on August 11th, I am not dead. The reports to the contrary are mere lies aimed at weakening the morale of our fighters," he said.
Russia said yesterday that Pakistan was helping the Taliban advance in what it called a threat to international security. "The military advance of the Taliban in the northern regions of Afghanistan is taking place with the direct assistance of Pakistani military forces, both for strategy planning and equipment supplies," a foreign ministry spokesman, Mr Valery Nesterushkin, said.
He said Russia and other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States must take "all necessary measures" to guarantee their borders.