by Ahmed Rashid
In July, the Taliban swept northwards from Herat, capturing Maimana on 12 July 1998 after routing Dostum's forces and capturing 100 tanks and vehicles and some 800 Uzbek soldiers – the majority of whom they massacred. On 1 August 1998, the Taliban captured Dostum's headquarters at Shiberghan after several of his commanders accepted Taliban bribes and switched sides. Dostum fled to Uzbekistan and later to Turkey. Demoralized by Dostum's desertion, more Uzbek commanders guarding the western road into Mazar also accepted bribes, thereby exposing the 1,500 strong Hazara force just outside the city to a surprise Taliban attack. It came in the early hours of 8 August 1998, when the Hazara forces suddenly found themselves surrounded. They fought until their ammunition ran out and only 100 survived. By 10.00 a.m., the first Taliban pickups entered Mazar, as an unsuspecting public was going about its daily business.7
What followed was another brutal massacre, genocidal in its ferocity, as the Taliban took revenge on their losses the previous year. A Taliban commander later said that Mullah Omar had given them permission to kill for two hours, but they had killed for two days. The Taliban went on a killing frenzy, driving their pick-ups up and down the narrow streets of Mazar shooting to the left and right and killing everything that moved – shop owners, cart pullers, women and children shoppers and even goats and donkeys. Contrary to all injunctions of Islam, which demands immediate burial, bodies were left to rot on the streets. ‘They were shooting without warning at everybody who happened to be on the street, without discriminating between men, women and children. Soon the streets were covered with dead bodies and blood. No one was allowed to bury the corpses for the first six days. Dogs were eating human flesh and going mad and soon the smell became intolerable,’ said a male Tajik who managed to escape the massacre.8
As people ran for shelter to their homes, Taliban soldiers barged in and massacred Hazara households wholescale. ‘People were shot three times on the spot, one bullet in the head, one in the chest and one in the testicles. Those who survived buried their dead in their gardens. Women were raped,’ said the same witness. 'When the Taliban stormed into our house they shot my husband and two brothers dead on the spot. Each was shot three times and then their throats were slit in the halal way,’ said a 40-year-old Tajik widow.9
After the first full day of indiscriminate killing, the Taliban reverted to targeting the Hazaras. Unwilling to repeat their mistake the previous year when they entered Mazar without guides, this time the Taliban had enlisted local Pashtuns, once loyal to Hikmetyar, who knew the city well. Over the next few days, these Pashtun fighters from Balkh guided Taliban search parties to the homes of Hazaras. But the Taliban were out of control and arbitrary killings continued, even of those who were not Hazaras. ‘I saw that a young Tajik boy had been killed – the Talib was still standing there and the father was crying. “Why have you killed my son? We are Tajiks.” The Talib responded, “Why didn't you say so?” And the father said, “Did you ask that I could answer?”’10
Thousands of Hazaras were taken to Mazar jail and when it was full, they were dumped in containers which were locked and the prisoners allowed to suffocate. Some containers were taken to the Dasht-e-Laili desert outside Mazar and the inmates massacred there – in direct retaliation for the similar treatment meeted out to the Taliban in 1997. ‘They brought three containers from Mazar to Shiberghan. When they opened the door of one truck, only three persons were alive. About 300 were dead. The three were taken to the jail. I could see all this from where I was sitting,’ said another witness.11 As tens of thousands of civilians tried to escape Mazar by foot in long columns over the next few days, the Taliban killed dozens more in aerial bombardments.
The Taliban aimed to cleanse the north of the Shia. Mullah Niazi, the commander who had ordered Najibullah's murder was appointed Governor of Mazar and within hours of taking the city, Taliban mullahs were proclaiming from the city's mosques that the city's Shia had three choices – convert to Sunni Islam, leave for Shia Iran or die. All prayer services conducted by the Shia in mosques were banned. ‘Last year you rebelled against us and killed us. From all your homes you shot at us. Now we are here to deal with you. The Hazaras are not Muslims and now we have to kill Hazaras. You either accept to be Muslims or leave Afghanistan. Wherever you go we will catch you. If you go up we will pull you down by your feet; if you hide below, we will pull you up by your hair,’ Niazi declared from Mazar's central mosque.12 As the Roman historian Tacitus said of the Roman conquest of Britain, ‘the Roman army created a desolation and called it peace.’
With no independent observers around to do a body count, it was impossible to estimate the numbers killed, but the UN and the ICRC later estimated that between 5,000 and 6,000 people were killed. It subsequently became clear that along the route of the Taliban advance similar massacres of Uzbeks and Tajiks had taken place in Maimana and Shiberghan. My own estimate is that as many as between 6,000 and 8,000 civilians were killed in July and August, including the heavy casualties amongst the anti-Taliban troops. But the Taliban's aim to terrorize the population so that they would not rise against them later, was to remain unfulfilled.
The Taliban were to target one more group in Mazar that was to bring down a storm of international protest and plunge them into near war with Iran. A small Taliban unit led by Mullah Dost Mohammed and including several Pakistani militants of the anti-Shia, Sipah-e-Sahaba party entered the Iranian Consulate in Mazar, herded 11 Iranian diplomats, intelligence officers and a journalist into the basement and then shot them dead. Tehran had earlier contacted the Pakistan government to guarantee the security of their Consulate, because the Iranians knew that ISI officers had driven into Mazar with the Taliban. The Iranians had thought that Dost Mohammed's unit had been sent to protect them and so had welcomed them at first.13 The Taliban had also captured 45 Iranian truck-drivers who had been ferrying arms to the Hazaras.
At first the Taliban refused to admit the whereabouts of the diplomats but then as international protests and Iranian fury increased, they admitted that the diplomats had been killed, not on official orders but by renegade Taliban. But reliable sources said that Dost Mohammed had spoken to Mullah Omar on his wireless to ask whether the diplomats should be killed and Omar had given the go-ahead. True or not the Iranians certainly believed this. Ironically Dost Mohammed later wound up in jail in Kandahar, because he had brought back two Hazara concubines and his wife in Kandahar complained to Mullah Omar. Some 400 Hazara women were kidnapped and taken as concubines by the Taliban.14
It was the Taliban victory, their control over most of Afghanistan and their expectation, fuelled by Pakistani officials that they would now receive international recognition, which partly prompted their guest, the Saudi dissident Osama Bin Laden, to become bolder in his declared jihad against the US and the Saudi Royal family. On 7 August 1998, Bin Laden's sympathizers blew up the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and wounding 4,500. This prompted the US to launch missile strikes on Bin Laden's training camps in north-eastern Afghanistan on 20 August 1998. Dozens of cruise missiles hit six targets killing over 20 people and wounding 30 more. The US claimed that Bin Laden had been present but escaped the attack. In fact there were few Arab casualties. Most of those killed were Pakistanis and Afghans who were training to fight in India-controlled Kashmir.
The Taliban were outraged and organized demonstrations in Afghan cities to protest against the attacks. UN offices in several towns were attacked by mobs. Mullah Omar emerged to blast Clinton personally. ‘If the attack on Afghanistan is Clinton's personal decision, then he has done it to divert the world and the American people's attention from that shameful White House affair that has proved Clinton is a liar and a man devoid of decency and honour,’ Omar said, in reference to the Monica Lewinsky affair. Omar insisted that Bin Laden was a guest, not just of the Taliban but of the people of Afghanistan and that the Taliban would never hand him over to the US. ‘America itself is the biggest terrorist in the world,’ Omar added.15 A
s UN officials evacuated Kabul because of growing insecurity, gunmen shot dead an Italian UN military officer and wounded a French diplomat. The two killers, Haq Nawaz and Salim both from Rawalpindi, whom the Taliban apprehended and jailed were both Pakistani Islamic militants from the Harkat ul Ansar group.
Instead of trying to placate their international critics and Iran, the Taliban launched an offensive from three directions on Bamiyan, which fell on 13 September 1998 after some Hazara commanders surrendered to the Taliban. Karim Khalili and other Wahadat leaders, together with much of the population of the town, took to the hills as the first Taliban troops entered. This time, due to repeated international appeals to respect human rights, Mullah Omar ordered his troops to restrain themselves against Hazara civilians. Nevertheless killings did take place in Bamiyan a few weeks after the Taliban entered. In one village near Bamiyan 50 old men, who were left behind after the younger population escaped, were killed by the Taliban.16
In another tragedy on 18 September, just five days after they occupied Bamiyan, Taliban fighters dynamited the head of the small Buddha colossus, blowing its face away. They fired rockets at the Buddha's groin, damaging the luxurious folds of the figure and destroying the intricate frescoes in the niche, where the statue stood. The two Buddhas, Afghanistan's greatest archaeological heritage, had stood for nearly 2,000 years and had withstood the assault of the Mongols. Now the Taliban were destroying them. It was a crime that could not be justified by any appeals to Islam.
For the Iranians the fall of Bamiyan was the last straw. Iran said it had the right of self-defence under international law and the UN Charter to take all necessary action against the Taliban – exactly the same argument used by Washington for its missile strike. A week later Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khomenei warned of a huge war which could engulf the entire region. He accused Pakistan of using troops and aircraft in the capture of Bamiyan, which was denied by Islamabad. Iran-Pakistan relations sunk to a new low as Tehran flexed its muscles. Seventy thousand Iranian Revolutionary Guards, backed by tanks and aircraft, began the largest military exercises ever along the Iran-Afghanistan border. In October some 200,000 regular Iranian troops began another series of exercises along the border as the Taliban mobilized some 5,000 fighters to prevent an expected Iranian invasion.
As the UN Security Council expressed fears of an all – out Iranian attack, it sent Lakhdar Brahimi back to the region. The military tensions between Iran and the Taliban only subsided when Brahimi met with Mullah Omar in Kandahar on 14 October 1998. It was the first time that Omar had ever met with a UN official or foreign diplomat who was not Pakistani. Omar agreed to release all the Iranian truck drivers, return the dead bodies of the Iranian diplomats and promised to improve relations with the UN.
The Taliban's confrontation with Iran had given Masud the time and space to regroup his forces and the remaining Uzbek and Hazara fighters, who had not surrendered. At the same time, increased arms supplies, including vehicles and helicopters, reached him from Russia and Iran. Masud launched a series of well co-ordinated, lightning attacks in the north east, capturing a huge swathe of territory back from the Taliban, especially along Afghanistan's sensitive border with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. There were some 2,000 Taliban casualties during October and November as the demoralized, poorly supplied and cold Taliban garrisons fought briefly and then surrendered to Masud. On 7 December 1998 Masud held a meeting of all field commanders opposed to the Taliban in the Panjshir valley. The collapse of the Hazara and Uzbek leadership had left Masud and his Tajiks supreme and the commanders, who included several prominent Pashtuns, appointed Masud as the military commander of all anti-Taliban forces.
The Taliban offensive, the massacre of Hazaras and the confrontation with Iran, along with the US cruise-missile attack dramatically undermined the fragile balance of power in the region. The Taliban's clean sweep also infuriated Russia, Turkey and the Central Asian states who blamed Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for backing the Taliban. The sharpened war of words increased the regional polarization between the two blocks of states. The foreign and defence ministers of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and Russian officials met in Tashkent on 25 August 1998 to co-ordinate joint military and political plans to halt the Taliban advance.
The consequences of the regional escalation were enormous: there was the danger of a war between Iran and the Taliban, which could also suck in Pakistan on the side of the Taliban; Western investors and oil companies became wary of further investments in the oil-rich Caspian nations; the danger of Islamic fundamentalism spreading to the already economically impoverished Central Asian states increased and anti-US feeling across the region escalated; Pakistan became more deeply polarized as Islamic parties demanded Islamicization.
The international community remained frustrated with the Taliban's intransigence in refusing to form a broad-based government, change its stance on the gender issue and accept diplomatic norms of behaviour. UN aid agencies were unable to return to Kabul. Washington was now obsessed with Bin Laden's capture and the Taliban's refusal to hand him over. Even close ally Saudi Arabia, which felt insulted by the protection that the Taliban were giving Bin Laden, pulled out its diplomatic representation in Kabul and ceased all official funding for the Taliban, leaving Pakistan as their sole provider.
These international frustrations resulted, on 8 December 1998, in the toughest UN Security Council Resolution on Afghanistan to date. The Resolution threatened unspecified sanctions against the Taliban for harbouring international terrorists, violating human rights, promoting drugs trafficking and refusing to accept a cease-fire. ‘Afghanistan-based terrorism has become a plague,’ said US envoy Nancy Soderberg.17 Pakistan was the only country that did not support the resolution, calling it biased and by now Pakistan was as internationally isolated as the Taliban.
Increasing pressure by the UN, the US and other states forced both sides back to the negotiating table in early 1999. Under UN auspices, delegations from the Taliban and the opposition met for talks in Ashkhabad on 11 March 1999. The talks ended on a hopeful note, with both sides agreeing to exchange prisoners and continue negotiating. But by April, Mullah Omar ruled out further talks, accusing Masud of duplicity. In fact both sides had used the lull and the talks to prepare for a renewed spring offensive. On 7 April 1999, Masud met with the Russian Defence Minister Igor Sergeyev in Dushanbe, as Russia announced it would build a new military base in Tajikistan. Clearly part of its role would be to step up military aid to Masud. The Taliban were re-equipping themselves and recruiting more students from Pakistani madrassas. Masud and the Hazaras launched a series of attacks in the north east and the Hazarajat. In a dramatic reversal Wahadat troops recapatured Bamiyan on 21 April 1999. The north was once again in flames as fighting spread and UN peacemaking efforts were back to zero.
At the beginning of 1998 Kofi Annan had warned, ‘In a country of 20 million people, 50,000 armed men are holding the whole population hostage.’18 By the end of 1998 Annan spoke ominously of ‘the prospect of a deeper regionalization of the conflict’ where Afghanistan had become ‘the stage for a new version of the Great Game’.19 Rather than bring peace, the Taliban victories and their massacres of the peoples of the north, had only brought Afghanistan even closer to the edge of ethnic fragmentation.
Annan's dire predictions appeared to be borne out by the end of the year when UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi announced his resignation. He blamed the Taliban for their intransigence, the support given to them by thousands of Pakistani madrassa students and continued outside interference. His resignation in October followed two Taliban offensives in July and September, which attempted to push Masud's forces out of the Kabul region and cut off his supply links with Tajikistan in the north.
Both offensives failed but the Taliban conducted a bloody scorched-earth policy north of the capital, which led to some 200,000 people fleeing the area and the devastation of the Shomali valley – one of the most fertile regions in the countr
y. As winter set in tens of thousands of refugees who had taken shelter with Masud's forces in the Panjshir valley and with the Taliban in Kabul faced acute shortages food and shelter.
Brahimi's resignation was followed by a much tougher reaction against the Taliban by the international community. The UN Security Council unanimously imposed limited sanctions on the Taliban on 15 October – banning commercial aircraft flights to and from Afghanistan and freezing Taliban bank accounts world wide – even as Washington stepped up pressure on the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden.
On February 6, 2000 the Taliban came under renewed international pressure after distraught Afghan civilians hijacked an Afghan Airlines passenger plane on an internal flight from Kabul and flew it to London where they asked for asylum. The hijacking ended peacefully four days later. In early March 2000 the Taliban launched abortive offensives against Masud's forces but were pushed back. The Taliban received a major blow to their prestige when two top NA leaders, who had spent three years in a Taliban jail in Kandahar, managed to escape on March 27 and arrived in Iran. The included Ismail Khan, who had led the Mujheddin resistance against Soviet occupying forces in the 1980's and then fought the Taliban.
In April the Taliban issued several appeals to the international community to help draught victims in three southern provinces and a locust plague in Baghlan province. The draught worsened over the summer affecting the entire country, but the Taliban's refusal to announce a ceasefire discouraged international aid. After three months UN agencies had received only US 8 million dollars out of US 67 million dollars for a draught appeal. As the draught worsened, prices for foodstuffs rose by over 75% between January and July and the Afghani currency lost some 50% of its value between February and July. However that did not stop the Taliban from launching their summer offensive against the NA on July 1. thousands of Taliban troops and dozens of tanks attacking from five directions, tried to blast their way through NA positions just 30 kilometers north of Kabul. However, the Taliban lost some 400 men as they were repelled by Masud's forces.
