Word: dostum
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...president for one year. But Rabbani held on for four years, during which time the forces of Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar waged a vicious artillery campaign that turned the capital into rubble and killed thousands. Hekmatyar was sometimes joined on the battlefield by the Uzbek militia of General Rashid Dostum, a former security chief of the Soviet-backed regime. Eventually, with direct military support from Pakistan and financial aid from Saudi Arabia, the Taliban swept to power in 1996, vowing to end the bloodletting...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Mazar, hundreds of the Taliban's 5,000 troops in the region took shelter around a power plant and a fertilizer factory; they believed the U.S. wouldn't hit the factory because doing so could send deadly ammonia fumes into the air. After a meeting with Atta Thursday night, Dostum initiated skirmishes with the Taliban. On Friday morning, the two met with Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq, who commands anti-Taliban Hazara fighters, to plan a three-pronged attack on Taliban positions ringing the city. A group of rebels surprised the Taliban by veering off the main road into Mazar and advancing...