Word: northerners
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...dead of night, horses poured from the hills. They came charging down from the craggy ridges in groups of 10, their riders dressed in flowing shalwar kameez and armed with AK-47s and grenade launchers. In the Kishindi Valley below, 35 miles south of the prized northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the few Taliban tanks in the area not destroyed by American bombs took aim at the Northern Alliance cavalry galloping toward them. But the 600 horsemen had been ordered to charge directly into the line of fire. "If you ride fast enough, you can get to them...
...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 they...
...visitors, but they can conceal tightly bound units with a fighting philosophy that places greater importance on energy conservation and brutal surprise than on sheer military muscle. "We must make sure that we pick the right time to fight," says Mohammed Kabeer Marzban, a warlord who controls the northern town of Khoja Bahauddin. "Otherwise we will have wasted our soldiers in vain." As the conflict wears on, learning the strange art of Afghan warfare will be critical to American success...
...that "taking the airfield is the same as taking Mazar." The runway may serve as a base from which U.S. jets will be able to strike targets within minutes. And the unclogging of the roadways leading into Mazar will help the U.S. build a "land bridge" from Afghanistan's northern border with Uzbekistan that the allies can use to pour in ground troops for an all-out assault on the Taliban...
...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...