Word: dostum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...They won. According to accounts given to Time by Alliance officials, 3,500 rebels serving under Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, 47, pushed the Taliban out of Kishindi with a 16-hour assault that left 200 Taliban and an unknown number of Alliance troops dead. To the west, forces loyal to Ustad Atta Mohammed, another Alliance commander, lost 30 men in a barrage of Taliban tank fire but seized the outlying village of Aq Kuprik. From there the Alliance's long-promised and much delayed march on Mazar-i-Sharif gathered an irresistible momentum. Some Taliban soldiers ran and hid, others...
...Taliban soldiers torched villages as they retreated, and there were fears that hundreds of locals--mostly ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazara--may have been barricaded in their burning homes. By Friday morning, when Dostum's troops reached the gates of Mazar, the Alliance said it had taken dozens of Taliban troops captive; many more were on the highway, headed out of town. Across the northern tier of Afghanistan, the Taliban abandoned several garrisons but made fierce efforts to defend others. "When they first arrived here, these fanatics believed they were bulletproof," said an Alliance spokesman. "Now they've been shown...
...order to attack came last Monday. Dostum's men scrambled out of their trenches and dashed toward the Taliban line in Kishindi, ducking behind rocks, bushes and trees. A handful of Taliban armored vehicles and tanks opened fire, forcing Dostum to order his forces to fall back. Sitting astride his dark bay pony, he radioed for the cavalry. By the next night, after "very fierce" fighting, the Alliance broke through. A local uprising against the Taliban sent the regime's men running from the district capital, Shulgarah. The treacherous Shulgarah Pass--a narrow ravine 14 miles southwest of Mazar where...
...which is to say there is still a long way and a lot of bloodletting to go. Mazar had barely been liberated last Friday when Dostum's forces overran the towns of Tashkurghan and Hairatan and zeroed in on Kunduz, one of the last Taliban strongholds in northern Afghanistan. A senior Alliance official told Time that the Alliance now controls the northwest and has advanced as far south as Pul-i-Khumri--100 miles away from the capital, Kabul. The official said Taliban soldiers stranded in Kunduz and further east in Taloqan have been cut off from fresh supplies...
...Taliban spent three years fighting for Mazar-i-Sharif, precisely because its capture would confirm them as masters of all Afghanistan. And that they are no longer. Sources reached by TIME inside the city on Friday confirmed claims by Northern Alliance generals Rashid Dostum and Ustad Atta Mohammed to have recaptured Mazar-i-Sharif. Taliban forces reportedly withdrew from the city after a bloody 90-minute battle at its southern entrance which began late in the afternoon, local time, triggering jubilant celebrations among the townspeople whose ethnic and political affinities are with the Northern Alliance...