Word: sharif
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...clear where the retreating Taliban forces are headed, and reports from Mazar-i-Sharif said some of their forces had regrouped on an adjacent hillside and were blasting the 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...
...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...
...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...
...rather than make a stand so far north of the movement's Pashtun heartland. Many of the Taliban's fighters in Mazar were reportedly not Afghan at all, but hardcore volunteers from Pakistan, Chechnya and the Arab world. That, and the history of bloody massacres each time Mazar-i-Sharif has changed hands precluded the possibility of surrender, and the overwhelming hostility of the local population to the Taliban left them little chance of prevailing in a street-by-street battle. Alliance commanders were always expecting lots of help from inside a city that had always viewed the Taliban...
...fall of Mazar-i-Sharif would be a body blow to the Taliban, although not a mortal one. The battle there turns out to have been a curtain-raiser for a showdown at Kabul. Still, winter's snows have not yet frozen the battlefields, and the Taliban has lost a city whose capture once confirmed its authority over almost all of Afghanistan. Even if the Alliance is unable to press their momentum at Kabul, the fall of Mazar is a signal that even if the Taliban manage to hold out for many more months, their best years are behind them...