Word: tajiks
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...upon each other, launching a ferocious civil war in which some 50,000 people are believed to havebeen killed. The issue was simply power, and its distribution both across different ethnic groups and among rival warlords within particular ethnic groups. In 1992, the victorious mujahedeen had agreed to appoint Tajik leader Burhanuddin Rabbani as president for one year. But Rabbani held on for four years, during which time the forces of Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar waged a vicious artillery campaign that turned the capital into rubble and killed thousands. Hekmatyar was sometimes joined on the battlefield by the Uzbek militia...
...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 acknowledged that the U.S. has air-dropped guns...
...cities, but defiant Taliban cadres made their stands. In the north, the estimated 6,000 Taliban troops who retreated to Kunduz from the decimated fronts at Mazar-i-Sharif and Taloqan had their supply lines and escape routes cut off. They had two options: surrender to the Uzbek and Tajik rebels or face death. As Taliban soldiers squabbled over whether to negotiate or fight--the Arabs arguing for the latter--U.S. B-52s on Saturday pulverized them while Alliance commanders promised to attack. Alliance troops in Kunduz killed scores of non-Afghan Taliban fighters--the much-loathed Sudanese, Egyptian, Saudi...
...opposition forces encircled the city, the Taliban mustered no more than sporadic skirmishing. That, and the week's long string of northern defeats, convinced anti-Taliban Pashtun that they could take down the core Taliban warriors in the south and persuade the rest to switch sides; the prospect of Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara fighters sweeping into Pashtun cities was far more harrowing to Taliban soldiers than was surrendering to their Pashtun brothers...
...Wednesday to take political charge of areas liberated by the Northern Alliance - although Rabbani desires reinstatement as the president of Afghanistan, he would be fiercely opposed by most Pashtun (the largest ethnic group). Even his Uzbek and Hazari allies in the Northern Alliance are not keen to see the Tajik Rabbani back in charge. Most Kabul residents remember his tenure as a nightmare of infighting between rival factions during which tens of thousands of Afghanis were killed. Alliance forces have already divided the capital into separate zones of control for different ethnic factions, and the northern group's internal divisions...