Word: dostum
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...northern Afghanistan was fierce on Thursday. And the confusion on the battlefield offered important clues as to the nature of the power shift in Afghanistan over the past month. Earlier Thursday, the commander of the Northern Alliance's Uzbek forces to the west of the city, General Rashid Dostum, announced that he had secured an agreement from Kunduz's Taliban commanders to lay down their arms by Sunday. But Northern Alliance Interior Minister Yunus Qanooni said from Kabul that cease-fire talks had failed, and that the Alliance was now fighting its way into the city...
...hard-line foreigners had even executed hundreds of Afghan Taliban to prevent them surrendering. Their resistance is unsurprising - while the Northern Alliance have been willing to forgive the Afghan Taliban all along, they have previously threatened to kill all the foreigners. The cease-fire deal announced by General Dostum Thursday offered safe passage home for disarmed Afghan Taliban, but imprisonment, trial and an uncertain fate for the foreigners. And in light of reports of massacres of foreign fighters from other towns seized by the Alliance, it would be surprising if the "tourists" accepted the deal made by their Afghan comrades...
...there are divisions on the Northern Alliance side too. General Mohammed Daoud, a Tajik commander in charge of the Alliance forces to the East of the city was reportedly unhappy that Dostum was conducting negotiations in Mazar-i-Sharif, at the same time as he was talking to the Taliban from his headquarters in Taloqan. Long-running tensions between the Uzbek and Tajik factions of the Northern Alliance may become sharply exacerbated now that the Alliance is claiming control over large swathes of territory. And those divisions, too, could have played a role in prompting Thursday's advance on Kunduz...
...Alliance commanders had been discussing surrender terms all week with senior Taliban commanders from Kunduz. The Alliance had given the Taliban forces until Thursday morning to surrender or face a frontal assault, but Dostum's cease-fire announcement appeared to have averted a bloodbath. Hours later, however, the guns were blazing and Alliance tanks were driving towards the city. Initially, the Taliban commanders had sought safe passage for the foreign fighters to Pakistan, but the U.S. was having none of a deal that might allow Al Qaeda fighters to escape...
...They drove out both Rabbani and his enemies, winning over most of the local warlords who dominate rural Afghanistan. Rabbani's ousted Tajik forces joined with the Shiite Hazari mujahedeen backed by Iran and with Dostum's Uzbek militia to create the Northern Alliance, which has now reclaimed Kabul thanks to the U.S. campaign against the Taliban. And while they're paying lip service to the notion of a "broad-based government," Rabbani is back in Kabul. Despite its internal divisions - Hazari fighters last week marched into Kabul to stake their own claim for a share of the Alliance...