Word: northerners
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...which sat in the dust coughing up blood. The boy used his father's rifle to put the animal out of its misery. It was the first time he had used a firearm, and it took him four shots. Three months later, Mukhtar joined the rebel Northern Alliance army to learn how to use a Kalashnikov. "My life is dedicated to killing the Taliban," he says, his reedy voice untouched by adulthood. "I will spend the rest of my life finding the people who killed my family...
...city with rockets. Still, the U.S. air support that helped the Alliance retake Mazar would make it extremely difficult for the Taliban forces to mass for a counterattack. Alliance commanders are hoping their allies along the way will stop the retreating Taliban reaching Kabul. Rather than defend its remaining northern outposts such as Kunduz and Taloqan in territory that, like Mazar-i-Sharif, is tribally and militarily hostile to the mostly Pashtun fundamentalist movement, the Taliban may instead concentrate its forces for a battle to hold on to the capital, where they have more support among the local population...
...Taliban may not yet be beaten, but they've suffered a serious setback that will substantially change the strategic equation in Afghanistan. The fall of Mazar appeared to signal a collapse of the Taliban's hold on northern Afghanistan, with Alliance troops quickly capturing two important towns to the north and east, and more importantly, almost immediately opening up a land corridor from the Uzbek border. That would allow massive shipments of humanitarian aid to be immediately shipped to hundreds of thousands of Afghans facing starvation on the northern plain. It would also allow the U.S. to ship tons...
...victory at Mazar-i-Sharif sets the stage for a de facto partition of Afghanistan into a northern arc controlled by the anti-Taliban alliance and a southern rump controlled by the Taliban. The main battle to take down the Taliban and the Al Qaeda network may lie ahead, but the Northern Alliance's newly won territory offers tremendous opportunity for the U.S. to intensify its campaign all over Afghanistan. The Pentagon's first priority may be to establish new air bases inside this zone, which can be used not only to resupply the Alliance and any expanded U.S. troop...
...surprisingly, the mood at the Pentagon has been more upbeat this week than it has been for most of the past month. "The Taliban had very bad days yesterday and today," a U.S. official told TIME on Thursday. "The Northern Alliance is closing in and is making very good progress." A victory at Mazar-i-Sharif will be taken as a vindication of the strategy of heavily bombing the Taliban frontlines to weaken their will to fight...