Afghanistan Rings in the New Year With Heaviest Fighting in 6 Months : Violence: Hospitals report eight dead and 250 injured. Week-old cease-fire is another casualty of civil war.

Afghanistan’s armed rivals rang in 1994 with the heaviest fighting in Kabul in more than six months, showering hundreds of rocket and artillery shells onto the divided, battered capital Saturday despite a cease-fire signed a week ago.

The two main hospitals in the city reported that eight dead and 250 injured had been brought in since the bombardment began at dawn, the British news agency Reuters reported. But heavy fighting prevented many injured from seeking assistance, and the total casualty toll was not known.

After first light, the rattle of firearms echoed through streets deserted save for tanks and armed men. Plumes of smoke marked the landing spots of shells and rockets, which rained down especially heavily on northern and eastern neighborhoods of the city ringed by the rugged Hindu Kush.

In the year and a half since Muslim rebels took power from the Communists, internecine fighting in Afghanistan has left at least 10,000 people dead, many of them civilians. In Kabul, buildings and much of the infrastructure left unscathed by 14 years of civil war have been devastated.

The major combatants have been troops loyal to President Burhanuddin Rabbani and forces aligned with Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In a statement released in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar, Rabbani claimed that Hekmatyar has now joined forces with Abdul Rashid Dostum, a powerful ex-Communist general, to try to oust him.

“The Communists want to undo the fruits of the jihad (holy war)” fought by U.S.-backed Muslim insurgents against the Soviet-supported Najibullah regime, presidential spokesman Bahauddin Ziayi told the Associated Press.

That development could have serious implications indeed for Rabbani, for whom Dostum’s support has been crucial. The general, with relatively few men and the handicaps of being an ethnic Uzbek and a former Communist to boot, has few chances to emerge as supreme leader.

But Dostum holds much of northern Afghanistan and is believed to be strong enough to bar anyone he opposes from winning control of the country. It was his eleventh-hour defection to the guerrillas that helped topple President Najibullah in April, 1992.

Dostum, based in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, had ordered his troops to stay out of the bloodletting as rival factions in the guerrillas’ coalition government warred for control of Kabul. But he was said to have given orders for an offensive after jets belonging to a Rabbani ally bombed his positions in northern Afghanistan on Friday.

Reports from Kabul said Dostum’s fighters fired salvos of rockets and artillery shells from an ancient fort south of Kabul’s center. Pro-presidential forces, meanwhile, shot back from a hilltop in a residential area.

At least three buildings were hit in the Soviet-built Microrayon housing complex in the northeast of the city where many pro-Dostum families live. Since the fighting broke out, Kabul has been divided into a crazy quilt of neighborhoods held by rival factions.

Ziayi, the presidential spokesman, asserted that government soldiers captured 300 rebels, five tanks and Kabul’s airport, formerly controlled by Dostum’s fighters.

A spokesman for Hekmatyar, Haji Farid, said the onslaught was part of an Islamic rebellion against Rabbani’s government. He claimed anti-presidential fighters had taken Kabul radio, the Finance Ministry, a strategic bridge on the outskirts of the capital and the central committee hall, next door to the presidential palace.

Neither side’s claim could be independently verified.

The cease-fire announced by the Afghan Cabinet a week ago was the latest in a string of dozens of truce agreements that failed to hold.