JUBILANT Taliban fighters tightened their grip on a newly captured air base and town north of the Afghan capital, Kabul, yesterday, witnesses said.
The Taliban seized the big Soviet-built air base of Bagram and the town of Charikar, about 50 km from Kabul, in a dawn attack on Thursday that apparently met little resistance.
Taliban fighters and travellers interviewed yesterday at the village of Mir Bacha Kot, 30 km south of Bagram, said there had been little overnight fighting and the front line was now about 2 km north of Charikar, now largely deserted.
A spokesman for the ousted government's military chief Ahmad Shah Masood, quoted by Iranian television, denied on Thursday that Bagram had fallen or that the front lines had moved.
But witnesses said Charikar, on the main road to the Salang Pass connecting Kabul and the Shomali Valley with northern Afghanistan, was firmly in Taliban hands.
They said the town was relatively unscarred, suggesting it had fallen with little struggle.
Witnesses also said the Taliban were in full control of Bagram air base, where bearded fighters were celebrating with bursts of gunfire.
The base, on a dusty plain with snow-capped peaks in the background, was used by Soviet forces in the 1980s to support a communist-backed government in Kabul.
Military analysts said the latest Taliban victory was significant, lifting the purist Islamic movement's morale, but had not necessarily dealt the opposition alliance a killer blow.
"There doesn't seem to have been much close-quarter fighting or determined opposition," said a foreign military observer.
"The anti-Taliban forces seem to have withdrawn after coming under artillery fire, possibly indicating low morale or lack of logistic resources. But it could signal a change in strategy to stretch the Taliban and use guerrilla tactics against them.
Gen Masood, forced to flee to his native Panjsher Valley after the Taliban seized Kabul on September 27th, used such tactics successfully during a counterattack in October that brought his forces back to within 20 km of the capital.
He helped the well-armed, mainly ethnic Tajik population of the Shomali Valley mount ambushes against the Taliban from villages, vineyards and orchards, along the road to the north.
Taliban fighters in village bazaars risked being stabbed in the back, blinded or burned to death, local people say. The Taliban responded by burning down houses or rocketing villages.
But forces loyal to Gen Masood and his rival-turned-ally Gen Abdul Rasheed Dostum failed to break through Taliban defences around Kabul, just as the Islamic fighters had earlier failed to penetrate Gen Dostum's northern heartland beyond the Hindu Kush mountain range or Gen Masood's Panjsher redoubt.