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Taliban will fight on in Kandahar: spokesman

Syed Tayyad Agha tells the media that the Taliban will not concede defeat.

SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan (CNN) -- The Taliban intend to fight on and will not concede the four or five provinces in Afghanistan they now control, senior Taliban spokesman Syed Tayyad Agha told a news conference on Wednesday.

Any report that they would surrender the stronghold of Kandahar was "just propaganda," he said.

The Taliban has had no recent communication with terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden or his supporters, Agha said.

Communication lines with the man accused of the September 11 bombings had been cut, he said. "We have no idea where he is," Agha added.

Agha is the personal secretary to Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader. Wednesday's news conference was the first by the Taliban since the suspension of daily briefings by the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan some weeks ago.

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Omar, he said, was in a secure, secret location under Taliban control, but the Taliban do not know the whereabouts of bin Laden.

"We have no idea where he is because our areas are limited now to three or four provinces so now we don't know where he is," Agha said. "There is no relation (with bin Laden) right now, there is no communication."

Reuters news agency quoted him as saying the Taliban had special secret channels to contact the fugitive millionaire but for the moment had no need to stay in touch. "We do not need to see him," Agha said.

He said the Taliban had sufficient forces to defend the area around the southern stronghold of Kandahar, where the fundamentalist movement began its systematic takeover of Afghanistan after the fall of the Soviet-backed communist regime in 1989.

"We just want to satisfy our nation and (other Muslims) in the world that we will try our best and we will defend our nation and we will defend our religion (to the death) and we will not give anyone a chance to disrupt our Islamic rule in Kandahar and surrounding provinces," Agha said.

Agha said the Taliban did not have the firepower to defend the entire nation against the United States and Britain, the two countries he said were engaged in terrorist attacks against the Taliban's implementation of Islamic law in Afghanistan.

But, he said, the Taliban were certain that "almighty Allah" would help them prevail.

The Taliban still control the provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Oruzgan, Zabol, and part of Ghazni province, Agha said.

'Standoff' over Kandahar

Northern Alliance and Taliban forces have been engaged in what the Pentagon called a "standoff" over Kandahar, where the Taliban retreated after the fall of Kabul and other northern areas in the past two weeks.

The Taliban agreed Wednesday to stop fighting in Konduz -- the last city still under their control in northern Afghanistan -- after hours of talks with opposition Northern Alliance commander Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum.

Konduz has been the source of heavy fighting in recent days, and many pro-Taliban fighters there had pledged to fight until their death.

Agha, speaking at the news conference in Spin Boldak near the Pakistan border, said he had no information about the situation in Konduz and declared rumors that Omar was prepared to negotiate a surrender of Kandahar -- the Taliban's spiritual center -- "baseless propaganda."

Agha also said the Taliban doubted the veracity of an interview of bin Laden conducted by a Pakistani journalist in which the suspected terrorist said he had nuclear weapons.

"We are not sure that he might have done this interview," Agha said, "and we don't see the chances of such a weapon with someone who used to live as a refugee in Afghanistan."

The United States has been dropping leaflets around Afghanistan offering a $25 million reward for information leading to bin Laden's capture.

The United States and its allies launched the attack in Afghanistan, where bin Laden was believed to be protected by the ruling Taliban, on October 7 in retaliation for the September 11 attacks in the United States.

President Bush had demanded that the Taliban hand bin Laden over, but Agha said Wednesday that the United States "had no right" to make that demand because it has no treaty with the Taliban covering such issues.

Agha also said that international support of the Taliban's opposition would return the country to the "division and other problems it was facing before 1994 and the time there was fighting in different factions of Afghanistan" after the fall of the communist government.

"After the collapse of the communist regime in Afghanistan (fighting among) different political jihadic parties ... caused anarchy in the country and caused looting, killing and robbing the innocent people of Afghanistan," he said.

The Taliban's implementation of sharia, the strict Islamic law under which severe penalties are meted out to those who disobey, solved the problem, Agha said, and led to the Taliban's eventual control over much of the country, beginning in Kandahar.

"The people of other provinces saw the situation and security and other good things in Kandahar, so they also requested for the Taliban forces to enter the provinces and take control of the provinces," Omar's spokesman said.