Alliance forces enter Kunduz

Northern Alliance forces advancing from the east and west had begun entering the besieged city of Kunduz on Sunday and the last redoubt of the Taliban in the north could fall in a day, officials said.

Tajik commander Mohammad Daoud said the town of Khanabad, the eastern gateway to Kunduz, had fallen to the alliance and forces under his command who were racing to the city 20 km (12 miles) away.

Daoud said he hoped his forces would enter Kunduz en masse on Monday.

"We plan to enter Kunduz city tomorrow," the commander told Reuters at his mud-walled bunker east of Khanabad. "We want to avoid fighting and we are still negotiating with the Taliban in Kunduz and hope to capture it without a fight."

Ethnic Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum had agreed to halt his advance on the town from the west, leaving fighters of his allies in the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance to occupy the town, Daoud said.

Witnesses saw reinforcements of tanks, armoured personnel carriers and infantry heading towards Kunduz from the east.

In the other direction, streams of pickups loaded with hundreds of black-turbaned Taliban fighters - Afghans who have agreed to give up to fellow countrymen in the Northern Alliance - arrived in alliance territory to surrender.

An advance party led by commander Mir Alam Khan had already entered Kunduz, an ancient city that commands trade routes to Tajikistan after meeting some minor Taliban resistance.

But foreign fighters loyal to wanted Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden have vowed to fight to the death rather than take their chances with enemies who loathe them.

Dostum's forces and Northern Alliance troops loyal to Tajik commanders have been laying siege to Kunduz for more than 10 days. Confusion over the surrender of Kunduz has been attributed to rivalry between the Uzbek and Tajik factions, which both want to win control of the city.

The fall of Kunduz would allow Northern Alliance forces and U.S. warplanes to concentrate on prising the radical militia out of its last strongholds in and around the southern city of Kandahar.

Abdul Nasir, a Northern Alliance Foreign Ministry official in Taloqan, said another 350 Taliban surrendered late on Saturday and fresh batches of fighters were giving themselves up on Sunday - both to Daoud's forces and to Dostum's.

Some 800 Afghan Taliban fighters, who have been promised a free passage home once they have been disarmed, surrendered to Daoud's forces on Saturday, bringing with them eight tanks, five anti-aircraft guns, seven rocket launchers and 40 vehicles.

Foreign volunteers were among 600 Taliban who gave themselves up to Dostum on Saturday, but fears lingered that many others would go down fighting and turn Kunduz into a bloodbath.

Many of those who gave themselves up were despondent, hiding their faces from the cameras.

But at least one fighter was defiant to the last, detonating a grenade as he was being searched, killing himself and two other Taliban fighters beside him, according to a reporter for Britain's Independent Television News, who was injured in the blast.