About 3,000 New Foreign Mercenaries, Chechens Included, Join Taliban Forces

About 3,000 foreign mercenaries joined the forces of the Taliban over the past few days to defend Kabul and the northern approaches to the Afghan capital. The Washington Post newspaper wrote this on Monday citing its own sources and the information from the Northern Alliance command. As the newspaper notes, despite Islamabad's assurances of having closed the border with Afghanistan, the mercenaries managed to cross it using the mountainous locality. "They appeared in Kabul two or three days ago and are crossing the border in groups every day", The Washington Post quotes Nadir Shah, the Northern Alliance field commander in the Dernam region, as saying. According to him, the composition of the mercenaries' ranks is "mixed - the Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens, but most of them are Pakistanis."