Taliban on the run as opposition forces close in on Kabul

The Taliban suffered a series of defeats as Northern Alliance forces pushed through defences north of Kabul, stopping their advance only four miles from the city.

Senior Taliban officials fled the capital after the opposition forces, backed by US air strikes and guided by the SAS and US special forces, advanced on Kabul. Northern Alliance commanders outside the city were shouting "To Kabul! To Kabul!" and there were growing signs that the opposition might try to capture the capital despite appeals from President George Bush to stop outside its gates.

The fighters paused on the west side of the front yesterday, but were expected to keep moving on the eastern perimeter near the strategically important Bagram airstrip.

Abdullah Abdullah, the opposition foreign minister, said: "There has been a significant withdrawal towards Kandahar [by the Taliban]. Ministers and high officials have left, but the foreigners, the terrorist groups, are making preparations for street-to-street fighting. We do not want to see any more fighting in Kabul. The civilians have suffered enough."

The Northern Alliance says it has captured almost half of Afghanistan in four days. Mr Abdullah said 6,000 opposition troops had made their advance in 10 hours of ferocious fighting. Witnesses saw Taliban soldiers fleeing in pick-up trucks, and F-18s diving out of the skies. Tanks were seen advancing en masse towards the front line from inside the Panjshir valley.

Witnesses also said they saw a small group of Western soldiers fighting. The Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, said that the SAS played a "significant" role in assisting the advance with US special forces.

But all the Northern Alliance victories so far have been in areas populated by ethnic minorities, where the mostly Pashtun Taliban are loathed, and Taliban resistance is expected to be tough in the south.

Taliban forces may have been slaughtered in the central province of Bamiyan, where the Hazara population was persecuted by the Taliban for following the Shia branch of Islam. Ahmad Bahram, a Hazara spokesman, said: "There have been very many casualties. [Taliban] bodies are just lying in the road."

If all the claims are true, in the four days since Mazar-i-Sharif fell, the Northern Alliance appears to have gone from an all-but-defeated army controlling 10 per cent of Afghanistan, to controlling almost all of the north.

But the US fears a bloodbath if the fighters enter Kabul, where 50,000 people died when Northern Alliance commanders fought each other over the city between 1992 and 1996.

In the west, Mohammed Abil, an opposition spokesman, claimed forces commanded by Ismail Khan, a hero of the mujahedin resistance against the Soviets, had captured Herat, which could open the way for an offensive against the Taliban's spiritual home of Kandahar. The Taliban Information Ministry said it was "possible" the city had fallen.

The Iranian state news agency reported that the city of Kunduz, one of the Taliban's last strongholds in the north, had fallen yesterday, but there was no confirmation of the claim.

The Northern Alliance says it is encountering the hardest resistance from foreign volunteers who they say are followers of Osama bin Laden.