Afghanistan Two days after capturing a key northern city, Afghan opposition forces claimed Sunday they had also taken their former headquarters of Taloqan. A Taliban official denied the claim. 
Taloqan, the capital of Takhar province, fell Sunday after a fierce battle outside the city with Taliban forces that included Arabs and Pakistanis, Northern Alliance spokesman Mohammed Abil said. Once the external line of Taliban defense crumbled, opposition fighters swiftly occupied the city, he said. 
"There was fighting all last night and all today," Abil said. He said the fall of Taloqan, which could not be independently confirmed, meant the Taliban still had a significant presence in only two northern provinces ? Kunduz and Baghlan. 
Alliance forces planned to move into Kunduz late Sunday, Abil said. 
Taloqan is 140 miles east of Mazar-e-Sharif, which fell to the opposition on Friday, and some 155 miles north of the capital, Kabul. 
Abdul Hanan Hemat, chief of the Taliban's Bakhtar news agency, denied claims that Taloqan had fallen. "They are lying," he said. 
Another opposition spokesman, Ashraf Nadeem, said Taliban forces also withdrew from the road-junction town of Pul-e-Khumri in Baghlan province and that alliance forces in the area were headed toward central Bamiyan province, west of Kabul. 
To the west, opposition official Noor Ahmad said advancing anti-Taliban troops seized Qala-i-Nau, capital of Badghis province, and were about 25 miles east of the major city of Herat. 
Despite the Taliban's denial that they lost Taloqan, the Islamic militia has acknowledged that its troops are withdrawing southward following weeks of round-the-clock U.S. bombing of their positions in the north. 
The Northern Alliance is comprised mainly of ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks, while the Taliban derive their support from the country's dominant Pashtuns, who live mostly in the south, as well as in Pakistan. 
In Kabul, buildings shook and windows rattled on Sunday as American warplanes bombed the outskirts of the capital. Heavy U.S. bombing overnight and into the day was intended to soften up Taliban positions. 
The fortunes of the Northern Alliance shifted dramatically following the Taliban withdrawal Friday from Mazar-e-Sharif, 45 miles south of the border with Uzbekistan. 
After seizing Mazar-e-Sharif, the opposition threatened to launch a major attack on Kabul within days. However, President Bush said Saturday that opposition troops should steer clear of Kabul until a broad-based government including all ethnic groups could be formed. 
"We will encourage our friends to head south ... but not into the city of Kabul itself," Bush said at a news conference in New York with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf ? whose country opposes a dominant role for the Northern Alliance in any future Afghan government. 
Bush's comments put plans for a major offensive toward Kabul on hold. The opposition could not launch a successful attack against the city without strong U.S. air support. 
The groups constituting the Northern Alliance held Kabul for several years preceding the Taliban's 1996 capture of the capital. Months-long street battles between different factions killed thousands of residents and devastated parts of the city. 
Gen. Alim Khan, a senior opposition commander along the front line north of Kabul, confirmed the offensive toward Kabul had been postponed and expressed frustration over U.S. opposition. 
"I'm tired of sitting around here doing nothing and my soldiers too," Khan said. "We should be going to the front line. ... If we want to enter Kabul we won't care about U.S. willingness or unwillingness." 
Another senior opposition officer at the Kabul front, deputy brigade commander Mir Rahman, said he thought "no one should interfere with our country or tell us what to do. If I go to Kabul, I will not stop there." 
Elsewhere, the Bakhtar news agency said 200 civilians died in bombing Thursday night and Friday morning in Shah Aga village in southern Kandahar province, a Taliban stronghold. There was no independent confirmation of the figure, and the Pentagon has accused the Taliban of inflating casualty figures. 
U.S. bombs also hit a tile factory on the eastern edge of Kabul on Saturday night, said Bakhtar chief Hemat. Two men were missing and believed dead, he said. 
Inside Kabul, Taliban soldiers manned checkpoints, stopping cars and searching passengers. The checkpoints were new and may have been prompted by the loss of northern territory and reports that opposition soldiers north of the city were preparing an offensive. 
Opposition spokesman Abil, speaking by satellite telephone from neighboring Parwan province, said he learned of Taloqan's fall from a radio message from the alliance defense minister, Mohammed Fahim. 
The opposition declared another success Sunday, saying a Taliban commander in central Bamiyan province had switched sides after seeing the battlefield momentum swing against him. 
The defection of the commander, Isamuddin, cut off the road for Taliban troops retreating from Mazar-e-Sharif to Kabul and isolated those still in the north, Abil said. 
The report of the Taliban commander's defection could not be independently verified. 
Bush launched the airstrikes after the Taliban refused to hand over Usama bin Laden, chief suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, which killed about 4,500 people. 
In an interview with a Pakistani journalist published in two installments over the weekend in Ausaf, a widely circulated Pakistani Urdu-language newspaper, bin Laden was asked if he was behind the anthrax attacks in the United States. 
The terror suspect laughed and said: "We don't know anything about anthrax."