Battles Rock Afghan Capital for Third Day : Revolt: The government claims it has beaten off coup attempt by former Communist leaders and disaffected premier. But fighting continues.

The Afghan capital was blasted with rockets and mortar bombs for a third straight day Monday, but the government claimed to have beaten off a coup attempt by former Communist leaders and the discontented prime minister.

The situation in Kabul is “under control,” asserted Eshan Jan Areef, charge d’affaires at Afghanistan’s embassy here. The forces fighting against President Burhanuddin Rabbani, he said, “must be crushed.”

News agencies said over 70 people had been killed and about 700 wounded in the factional warfare that erupted in Kabul before dawn on New Year’s Day, although definite figures were impossible to get.

In a statement, the Afghan Foreign Ministry said only “minor resistance” was being experienced in Kabul proper on Monday. In fact, scores of rockets and artillery rounds rained down on government and military buildings and residential districts alike.

Jets from the government’s air force counterattacked, bombing the rebel stronghold at the ancient Bala Hissar fort south of Kabul.

Rabbani’s official palace and its grounds were struck many times by rockets and explosive shells. But observers said his forces appeared to still be in control of most of the key locations in the city, the presidential palace included.

Officials in Rabbani’s government accused Abdul Rashid Dostum, a general during the days of Afghanistan’s pro-Soviet Communist regime, of joining forces with disaffected Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s hard-line Hezb-i-Islami group, which is headquartered 15 miles southeast of Kabul.

Another alleged party to the “shameless conspiracy” to grab control of the country’s most important city was Mahmood Baryalai, brother of Afghanistan’s former pro-Soviet puppet ruler Babrak Karmal, the Foreign Ministry charged.

Denouncing as “un-Islamic” the attempt to unseat him, Rabbani appealed Sunday to other parties in the fractious coalition government to join him and wage jihad (holy war) against the guerrillas. The Foreign Ministry statement blasted Hekmatyar for being ready to make common cause with the Communists whom he and other leaders of the Muslim resistance had fought courageously for years.

But the Reuters news agency quoted one of Dostum’s senior commanders as saying that ethnic grievances, not economics or religion, were the real reason for the revolt against the president.

“We carried out the attack because we wanted to change the political system in Afghanistan,” said the commander, identified only as Gen. Fauzi. “Rabbani is running the country only in favor of the Tajiks.”

Dostum and his fighters are Uzbeks, a minority that lives in Afghanistan’s north.

Afghanistan’s Islamic militias formed a coalition government after ousting the Soviet-backed regime of President Najibullah in 1992. But they have since turned their guns on each other, and at least 10,000 people have died.