Kunduz falls, and a bloody vengeance is executed

When we reached the centre of the city, the Taliban soldiers were still lying in the streets where they had been shot. A tall, bearded man lay near the main roundabout with his arms and legs twisted in his death agony. A trail of blood snaked down his forehead, glistening in the sun.

A crowd of people gathered to watch one of the Taliban die. He lay there, shivering despite the warmth. At least 50 men stood and watched, but not one tried to help him. They did not have words of comfort to offer him. He died there, under their unforgiving stare.

They brought a heavy-set Talib into the crowd, and the Northern Alliance soldiers beat him with their rifles, holding them by the barrel and swinging the butts into him. He was screaming, and blood was pouring from his mouth, but they kept on beating. The local people joined in – many of them probably faithful Taliban supporters until yesterday – kicking him in the head where he lay on the ground. Eventually the soldiers dumped him in a truck, which sped away. Nobody expected to see him alive again.

This was the long-awaited fall of Kunduz, the Taliban's last stronghold in the north. Some said the battered man was a Pakistani, but otherwise there was no sign of the thousands of Osama bin Laden's foreign volunteers that the Alliance said were ready to fight to the death in the city. They were believed to have fled west, to a village on the road to Mazar-i-Sharif.

People here spoke of street-to-street fighting at 7am, when the Alliance troops led by General Mohammed Daud advanced into town. They said the Taliban had been killed in the fighting. But some of the bodies lying on the streets had their big toes tied together, so they could not run. They had not died in fighting. They had been executed. And if the Afghan Taliban were slaughtered, the foreigners can have little hope of anything better.

The Alliance said only a small number on each side were killed in the final battle for Kunduz, and the five or six bodies on the streets were all the Taliban casualties. The claim was impossible to confirm. The Alliance dead had been removed, but no one touched the Taliban.

As the afternoon wore on, the bodies started to smell, but still nobody moved them. The flies, spoilt for choice, moved between the animal carcasses hanging at the butcher's and the bodies of the Taliban. Somebody threw a cloth over the face of the man near the main roundabout. But the crowds hung around all day, as if waiting for another chance to try to beat a Talib to death.

The majority of the population of Kunduz are ethnic Pashtuns and very few of those were on the streets yesterday. There was not a woman to be seen. Shops remained bolted shut except for a handful. "By the help of God, all of Kunduz is now secured," the loudspeakers in the centre of town announced. "Soldiers, do not loot. Keep good discipline and order." All around the soldiers' feet lay the Taliban they had massacred. The soldiers were busy looting. They drove past, towing their new pick-ups behind them. Some were towing two or even three cars behind a single labouring Russian truck.

The people told us there was little left to loot. The soldiers of the Uzbek warlord General Rashid Dostum had come into the town and helped themselves to the best spoils at 10pm the day before. They had fought the Taliban until 3am, then withdrawn before General Daud arrived. After all, General Dostum promised the Alliance leadership he would not to enter Kunduz before their man, General Daud.

We walked to the end of town, where the foreigners were supposed to be holding out in the village. "Don't go any further," the Northern Alliance soldiers warned us. "The Taliban will shoot you."

But where they stood, on the edge of town where the fields began, all was quiet and peaceful. The Northern Alliance is still claiming that Pakistani military planes have been landing at Kunduz airport, and flying the foreigners out. One commander said he had seen foreign fighters queuing to get on a waiting plane.

We drove close to the airport, but there was no sign of planes. The Americans, who control the skies of Afghanistan, insist they are not letting any foreigners fly out of Kunduz.

The Alliance says it has the foreigners surrounded, and is negotiating for their surrender. If the bodies on the streets of Kunduz are anything to judge by, there are reasons to fear the foreigners' last stand may end in a massacre.