For a Moment Only, Rebels Are Brothers : Kabul: Dread spreads as fast as relief as chapter closes on struggle. City has two opposing commanders with no apparent government to lead them.

Rebel commander Mohammed Tahir didn’t have much of a strategy to fend off rival moujahedeen factions after he took the Afghan regime’s main armory of weapons and ammunition Saturday morning without firing a shot.

But somehow, it worked.

“We were here first,” Tahir said, explaining how he fended off the challenge of another guerrilla force loyal to fundamentalist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and held the strategic facility for his own rebel leader, Commander Ahmed Shah Masoud, a moderate.

“That was enough. These other commanders are our brothers. And for now, no one really wants to fight, anyway.”

So it seemed throughout Kabul on Saturday as moujahedeen guerrilla fighters who had not set foot in their capital during the long conflict took over the city piece by piece, driving out the vestiges of a failed socialist regime.

They had already taken over the Afghan countryside and other cities piecemeal over the last 10 days as the regime collapsed. Taking the capital capped their long struggle.

There were wild celebrations in Kabul. But with the capital, like the countryside, now divided among hundreds of rival rebel commanders, with two opposing charismatic leaders and no apparent government to lead them, dread spread as fast as the sense of relief.

The scene near the capital’s military hospital Saturday afternoon caught the mood.

An ambulance carrying a soldier wounded in one of the sporadic firefights that broke out in the confusion was stopped at gunpoint by rebels who had commandeered a taxi that ran out of gas.

While the wounded soldier writhed and screamed with pain, the rebels pried open the ambulance’s gas cap, only to find that there wasn’t even enough fuel in the tank to fill the 20-ounce tin teapot they carried with them.

Just down the road, watching the array of armed rebel groups seizing the tanks, artillery pieces and huge military compounds that had backed Afghanistan’s fallen regime, a taxi driver who had endured 14 years of that authoritarian regime concluded, “Afghanistan is finished.”

The capital’s fabled Chicken Street, which features imported liquor and food, rolled down its shutters at the first sight of the moujahedeen , who have vowed to install a strict Islamic government in the capital.

Overloaded buses groaned out of the city center with a mass of frightened human cargo. And thousands of others desperately tried to flag down passing taxis, which were filled with heavily armed rebels who had taken them at gunpoint.

In Kabul’s Microrayon district, a cracked and weather-beaten series of high-rises built by the fallen regime’s former Soviet backers, one of the founders of the discredited Marxist party here assessed the situation.

“There is no guarantee for safety,” Suleiman Layeq, a poet and a regime stalwart, said as he nervously clicked his amber prayer beads in a cold and austere apartment. “There is no guarantee for anyone’s security now. Now it is possible for anything to happen--peaceful change, violent change or the end of our nation.”

Layeq, who is remembered by most guerrilla leaders for his 1970 poem that used words reserved only for Allah to praise Soviet founder V.I. Lenin, sent his wife and daughter out of the country just two days before the moujahedeen took Kabul.

“It’s impossible to predict the events for tomorrow or after tomorrow,” he said. “And I’m afraid that yesterday too many mistakes were made.”

Speaking of his own future as guerrillas began to take over the capital, Layeq, 61, added: “We are still responsible to guard the security of the people of the city, and I don’t want to put myself in a hole. If they shoot at me, I’ll defend myself. I want to finish my days as a man. And meanwhile, I will see if I can play some role for peace.”

Former government soldiers, many of them conscripts forced to fight for a regime they feared, generally seemed relieved and pleased at the guerrilla takeover.

Pvt. Noorul Haq managed to stuff everything he owned into a small plastic bag and beamed as he made his way out of the presidential palace. Guerrilla leader Masoud’s troops had just taken the complex that is Afghanistan’s synonym for power. They asked the soldiers to leave. They left so fast, they jammed through the gate.

“Praise to God, of course I’m happy,” said the young conscript, who was four months into his second two-year tour of duty to protect a president he never even met.

Other soldiers kissed the moujahedeen they had fought for 13 years. Bright red tulips and clumps of purple wildflowers passed between them, many ending up in the barrels of their assault rifles.

On a flower-covered, Soviet-built T-54 tank outside the palace, two fighters sat arm in arm. One was in a soldier’s uniform, the other in camouflage, and they spoke animatedly as they leaned against the gun barrel. The two had known each other 13 years ago. And Saturday was the first time they had spoken in all those years of war.