Taliban continue as Omar orders them to fight; CIA officer killed

KABUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Taliban’s supreme leader urged his forces to stand and fight Wednesday as U.S. Marines poured into a secret base in Afghanistan and the CIA said one of its officers had been killed, the first American to die in the ground campaign to hunt down Osama bin Laden.
Pinned by American bombing, in the sights of the Marines and under assault from Afghan tribal foes, the fundamentalist Taliban were trapped in their southern stronghold of Kandahar but their supreme leader forbade surrender.
“Don’t vacate any areas,” said Mullah Mohammad Omar, who is being targeted for sheltering bin Laden, whom the United States blames for Sept. 11 attacks that killed more than 3,900 people.
“This is not a question of tribes,” Omar was quoted as saying in a radio message. “This is a question of Islam.”
In Bonn, Germany, the United Nations played down hopes on Wednesday that Afghan factions could soon agree on a post-Taliban government as the Northern Alliance held firm against foreign peacekeepers and debated the future role of former Afghan King Zahir Shah.
On the battlefront, the U.S.-backed Alliance forces said they had taken back control of a fortress near the northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif where up to 600 captured fighters belonging to bin Laden’s al Qaeda may have been killed in a revolt put down by U.S. bombing and fierce ground attacks.
The CIA said that in the firefight Johnny Michael “Mike” Spann, 32, who worked for the agency’s clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations, was killed and that he “was where he wanted to be: on the front lines serving his country.”
A U.S. defense official said Taliban troops were “digging furiously” through debris of a leadership compound in southern Afghanistan shattered by U.S. bombs, “an indication to us of the success of the strikes.” There was no evidence, however, that senior Taliban or al Qaeda officials died there.
In Islamabad, a spokesman for the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, said Mullah Omar was still alive. The Taliban have said bin Laden is not in territory under their control.
The Pentagon said now its aim was to go after top leaders.
“Any time you can dismantle the leadership or this chain of command, you then have groups of troops who are uncoordinated and uncontrolled and therefore much less effective,” Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem told reporters.