Taliban ordered to surrender city or face assault

The U.S.-backed Northern Alliance told the Taliban today to surrender the Afghan city of Kunduz in three days or face assault, the Associated Press reported.

Also today, Afghanistan's former president gave his qualified approval for United Nations-brokered power-sharing talks abroad, clearing the way for a meeting of Afghan factions this weekend in Germany to discuss a multiethnic, post-Taliban government.

The head of the Northern Alliance, Burhanuddin Rabbani, told CNN that such a gathering would be mainly "symbolic" and that real decision- making must take place inside Afghanistan. Rabbani has demanded the talks be held in the Afghan capital, Kabul, where his Alliance faction is in control.

Also today, the bodies of four international journalists were recovered and identified by colleagues, a day after their convoy was ambushed in a narrow mountain pass on a road to Kabul.

In the standoff over Kunduz, Alliance spokesman Attiq Ullah, speaking from the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, said fighters loyal to Osama bin Laden--mainly Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis--had been preventing the Taliban from giving up Kunduz. A Northern Alliance commander, Gen. Mohammed Daoud, said the Taliban had shot 470 of their own fighters in the past days after learning they planned to surrender. Three hundred of them were mowed down together with their commander, he said.