Taliban Predict New Civil War

The Taliban lost contacts with Osama bin Laden after the fall of Kabul, or over 10 days ago, and "only Allah knows where he is now," Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef said in a telephone interview published by the Saudi newspaper Al-Shark Al-Awsat. The ambassador indicated that thousands of foreign militants who had been fighting with the Taliban were killed in US airstrikes, artillery shells and were captured by the Northern Alliance forces. The Taliban representative called the coming negotiations on a future government of Afghanistan "a political plot." The Berlin negotiations "do not meet the interests of Afghanistan," he claimed. The ambassador calls groups within the Northern Alliance "brother enemies" and predicts that already in the near future they will wage a civil war.