Factions struggle to agree on Afghan leadership
Rival Afghan factions were today trying to agree on the members of an interim government for the country, as a man believed to be a US citizen was found among captured Taliban fighters.
The man, seized after a bloody siege at a prison fort near Mazar-e-Sharif, was identified by his parents as John Philip Walker Lindh, 20, of Fairfax, California.
Walker, who uses his mother Marilyn’s maiden name, told Newsweek magazine’s website he was born in Washington DC but joined the Taliban after converting to Islam and changing his name to Abdul Hamid.
He surrendered with more than 80 prisoners from Pakistan and Arab and central Asian countries, after Northern Alliance soldiers flooded their hiding place with water on Saturday.
Mrs Walker, a home health care worker, described her son as a ‘‘sweet, shy kid’’ who had gone to Pakistan with an Islamic humanitarian group to help the poor.
Reports of his capture were the first she had heard of him since he left a religious school in Pakistan’s northwest frontier province, where he had been studying Islam, seven months earlier.
She said: ‘‘If he got involved in the Taliban, he must have been brainwashed. He was isolated. He didn’t know a soul in Pakistan. When you’re young and impressionable, it’s easy to be led by charismatic people.’’
Walker was taken into custody by US special forces and was reportedly being treated by the Red Cross in Mazar-e-Sharif for grenade and bullet wounds.
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said: ‘‘US military forces in Afghanistan have in their control a man calling himself a US citizen.’’
The power-sharing talks in Bonn, Germany, between the Northern Alliance, supporters of the former Afghan king and two smaller exile groups yesterday came close to agreeing on an interim premier for the new administration.
The leading candidate to head the new executive is Hamid Karzai, an exiled leader of Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, a moderate Muslim.
Karzai came under attack by Taliban forces a few weeks ago for trying to persuade Afghans to support a new government. He escaped with the help of US forces.
But Western diplomats observing the talks said Afghan delegates secluded at a hilltop hotel may need several days to agree on details - in particular, the make up of a roughly 30-member executive body.
The Northern Alliance has also raised objections to the deployment of any international peacekeeping force, which Tony Blair has promised to commit British troops to.
