In Afghan Capital, Factions Battle for Strategic Sites : Warfare: More than 600 are wounded in the first two days of the new year. Dozens are reported killed.

Feuding Islamic factions blasted each other with air strikes, rockets and automatic gunfire Sunday in a major battle for the presidential palace and other strategic sites in the shattered capital.

More than 600 people, both civilians and soldiers, have been treated at three Kabul hospitals since the latest blood bath began in the pre-dawn darkness on New Year’s Day. In addition, dozens were killed, and many of the wounded have not been able to reach hospitals, according to witnesses.

President Burhanuddin Rabbani’s militia, which controls the largest chunk of Kabul, was trying to withstand an onslaught by the combined forces of Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ex-general in the former Communist army.

At least six separate Islamic factions hold parts of the capital. Most or all were involved in the shooting, but none is considered capable of delivering a decisive blow in the 14-year-old war.

The militias had formed a coalition government after ousting the Soviet-backed Communist regime in 1992. But since then, they turned their guns on each other in a personal feud among their leaders, leaving an estimated 10,000 dead in Kabul and flattening entire neighborhoods.

Rabbani’s militia appeared to be clinging to the city’s most crucial sites, including the presidential palace in the heart of Kabul.

But the palace and the sprawling grounds were hit repeatedly with rockets and artillery fire in the heaviest fighting in six months. The extent of the damage was not immediately clear.

Rabbani’s supporters claimed that they killed 200 enemy soldiers, wounded 300 and captured 820 while suffering only 18 deaths among their fighters. However, the figures could not be confirmed and the parties regularly exaggerate their battlefield successes.

The civilian casualty toll was heavy. Most of the fighting was waged with rockets and artillery shells that are notoriously inaccurate. Many missed military targets and slammed into private homes and shops that had been shuttered.

The normally bustling streets of Kabul were empty except for the occasional tank and heavily armed soldiers making quick dashes from one side of the street to the other.

Plumes of smoke rose into the winter sky. The city rumbled throughout the day as the rockets came crashing down.

Electricity, sporadic even in periods of relative calm, was off. International phone lines have been down for more than a year.

The airport was closed, and state-run Radio Afghanistan stopped broadcasting Saturday after the fighting began.

Two shells hit the main military hospital, a rocket hit the operating theater of the Jamhuriat hospital and several rockets landed in the grounds of a third hospital. There were no immediate details of casualties.