The arrangements to fill this position were supposed to have been finalized a day earlier. Commander Aamer Latif Ibrahimi, an Uzbek leader who had negotiated the Konduz surrender deal with the Taliban over the weekend, believed he had been promised the position by top Alliance officials. But another commander, Mohammad Daoud Khan, an ethnic Tajik, felt differently.
Red Cross workers, too, were among those waiting for news in front of the mosque. “Afghanistan is always volatile,” says Chris Paul Giannou, a surgeon who had come to Konduz as one of a Red Cross team to assess whether the situation was safe enough to bring in supplies for the city’s looted hospital. “The question is whether [the Northern Alliance] will have learned from their previous experience.”
Despite the tension–and local residents’ accounts of looting by some Northern Alliance soldiers–most Konduz civilians seemed genuinely happy to see the Alliance troops after what some described as a Taliban reign of terror during their final weeks of power in the city.
“All the Taliban, but especially the foreigners [non-Afghan members] were going crazy,” said Abdul Jabar, a Tajik shopkeeper. “They were very dangerous. If you saw them on the street you would cross to the other side just to avoid them.” Another storekeeper, Abdul Sezhah echoed his words. “They would just arrest people they saw on the street and put them in jail,” said Sezhah, a Pashtun who shares a common language and ethnicity with the Taliban. “They told them ‘if the negotiations do not go well, we will kill you all.’”
Sezhah said that despite their common ethnicity, local Pashtuns did not fare much better than their Uzbek and Tajik neighbors under the mostly southern Pashtun Taliban, since they came from a different, more multi-ethnic environment than most of the southerners. But he added that unlike himself, many Pashtuns were staying indoors for fear of reprisals by Uzbek and Tajik forces. “But all of Konduz should be very happy,” Sezhah said. “Thank you to America for helping this to happen.”
Another city resident held out a small transistor radio playing Afghani popular music. A middle-aged man, he smiled and sighed at the scratchy melodies emanating from the tiny radio. Then he pointed at the radio, said “Under Taliban”–and ran his finger across his throat as if with a knife.
Those Taliban members have now largely disappeared. When I drove into Konduz on Monday morning, we did run straight into a group of them on their way out. Our jeepload of journalists had stopped at a checkpoint on the road north of the city when a topless jeep and a truck loaded down with black-turbaned fighters and sporting an antiaircraft cannon sped past shouting Northern Alliance soldiers. The Alliance soldiers fired warning shots, and the Taliban on the truck fired back at them as we ducked behind our jeep. After a few more shots, the truck and jeep stopped 100 yards past the checkpoint and Alliance soldiers rushed up to it.
Our escort, Faiz Mohammed Ibrahimi, the brother of commander Aamer Latif walked over to the 20 or so Taliban members ranged around their vehicles. They told him they were from the northern village of Dasht Archi, and wanted to go home. He replied that they could not leave Konduz without the written permission of his brother, and that they would have to go back into the city, find him, and get it. Otherwise they would have to surrender just like everybody else. They could leave their cannon and all but four of their men at the checkpoint, and go back into town, with their rifles. The jeep turned around and sped back into town. Mohammed came back to our car, smiled, and said “no problem!”
Now the big question in Konduz is, “where are the Taliban?” There were supposed to be as many as 15,000 Afghan and foreign fighters in the town, but no one seemed to know where they all had gone. Aside from several small engagements in which a number of Alliance troops were wounded by snipers, and a commander was killed by a Taliban suicide bomber. But most of the Taliban, particularly the foreign fighters from Pakistan and Arab countries were nowhere to be seen.
Alliance commanders and local citizens alike claim that throughout Sunday night and early Monday morning, as many as 30 transport aircraft flew in and out of the Konduz airport, evacuating the foreign Taliban, raising speculation that Pakistan, with the agreement of the Northern Alliance and the United States, had spirited them out of the country before they followed through on their vows to fight to the death.
Among the local Taliban, thousands of were reported streaming towards Char Darreh, a village to the west of Konduz on the road to Mazar-e Sharif. General Rashid Dostum’s forces claimed to have captured as many as 6,000 local and foreign Taliban on Monday.
Ironically, the fall of Konduz was marred when U.S. planes bombed forces belonging to their ally, Aamer Latif, in a fortress just north of the center of town. Only hours after moving into the Kuna Kala fort on Sunday, Latif’s forces were bombarded through the night by U.S. aircraft. Initially, Latif’s aides claimed that the friendly fire incident had destroyed “dozens” of their vehicles, including several tanks, and that their crews missing. By Tuesday morning, however, a lower toll emerged: five soldiers dead, five wounded, and one tank, a multiple rocket launcher, and several trucks and jeeps destroyed. In another strange twist, Alliance troops wandering among the wreckage found U.S. propaganda leaflets showing America and Afghanistan shaking hands, and photos of American and Afghan families. The U.S. planes dropped the leaflets on their allies at the same time as their bombs.
On Tuesday, while the commanders haggled over positions throughout the day, Faiz Mohammed fumed, voicing the widely-held view among Uzbeks that the Tajik-dominated government, defense, and foreign ministries, unfairly favors Tajik commanders and officials like General Daoud. He also suggested that it was possible that General Daoud, aware that Latif’s forces had taken the fortress, had called on the Americans to strike it anyway, to hurt the Uzbek commander, and make it easier for his own forces to get into the city.
Such intrigues recall the height of the civil wars which followed the mujahedin victory over the Soviet backed government in 1992. As soon as the war was won, the warlords and the government turned on each other, tearing the country apart for six years, and leaving the way open for the Taliban to seize control of most of the country.
By Tuesday evening the commanders had reached a basic agreement on the formation of a provisional government and military council for the province, but there was still no agreement on who would be in charge. At the end of the day, Aamer Latif insisted that he would be governor, and Daoud said he would not. Their troops, instead of hunting down escaping Taliban, sat in Konduz, watching each other.
