Word: mazar
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...outskirts of 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...
...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 the Alliance had expected to be ambushed by enemy gunners--had been abandoned by Taliban troops before the Alliance arrived...
...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 resolve has caused mounting anxiety among U.S. military strategists, particularly because until last week the Northern Alliance showed few signs of war readiness. Three weeks ago, near Mazar-i-Sharif, a rebel charge was turned back by a Taliban counteroffensive because the Alliance's four rival commanders failed to coordinate their attacks. In the north, the Alliance's loose-knit guerrilla bands are plagued by ethnic infighting, inexperience and customary drug use. The preferred narcotic is a potent, pungent hashish that is smoked by Alliance and Taliban soldiers alike from dinner until midnight. Alliance soldiers say they make...
...exploiting Taliban vulnerability. "These folks are aggressive," U.S. Marine General Peter Pace said Wednesday. "They're taking the war to their enemy--and ours." For the Alliance, the war's critical turn came early this month when U.S. B-52s began hammering Taliban front lines dug in near Mazar and Kabul and further north, along the Tajik border. Despite U.S. frustration with the Alliance's sluggishness, the complexity of waging war in an alien, booby-trapped environment gave Pentagon strategists little choice but to embrace the rebels as a proxy ground force. For the first time, the Pentagon last week...