Word: northerners
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...been part of the U.S. strategy, on the grounds that allowing such an ethnically-narrow force to capture the capital would complicate efforts to forge a broad-based government and potentially rally many uncommitted Pashtuns - the largest ethnic group - behind the Taliban. Also, Pakistan is deeply suspicious of the Northern Alliance and was supporting the Taliban's war against the Alliance before September 11. Instead, the U.S. had encouraged the Alliance to move on Mazar-i-Sharif, a strategically important city in the opposition group's northern heartland that fell to the Taliban...
...Capturing the northern city whose population numbers somewhere between 150,000 and 700,000 may be the key to breaking the Taliban's supply lines in the north and facilitating the Northern Alliance's reclaiming of much of northwestern Afghanistan. It would potentially also allow the U.S. a foothold deep inside Afghanistan to help wage war further south. But it is the psychological impact of taking it before winter that may be most important: Mazar-i-Sharif was the last major domino to fall to the Taliban in its conquest of Afghanistan, and its recapture by the opposition would signal...
...from certain. The city is, in every sense, occupied by the Taliban. The majority of its residents are Uzbek and Hazari, and the Taliban can only count on the support of a few Pashtun villages on the outskirts of the town. For the rest, they rule by fear, and Northern Alliance leader General Rashid Dostum believes his Uzbek supporters in the city will function as a fifth column once the battle begins. That may not be enough...
...Northern Alliance claims the Taliban has some 20,000 troops in Mazar-i-Sharif, whereas the Alliance can muster, at most, half that. The Taliban forces, which allegedly include a number of Arab volunteers of the Bin Laden-trained "Brigade 55," are better armed. And it's a relative certainty that they're more motivated right now: Running up the white flag is simply not an option when surrender would bring almost certain death. Contemplating the Alliance's recapture of the city, Alliance commander Mullah Ustud Mohammed Atta recently told TIME, "We will kill them...
...that's unlikely to be an idle threat, for each time the city has changed hands, blood has flowed freely. The Taliban first seized the city in 1997 after one Northern Alliance commander had betrayed another and invited them in. But when the local militiamen rebelled against Taliban efforts to disarm them, thousands of Taliban fighters were killed in the ensuing uprising - many of them executed by suffocation in shipping containers or being dropped alive into wells which were then bulldozed over. When the Taliban recaptured the city a year later, it exacted a terrible revenge, butchering some...