Afghanistan Sinks Deeper Into the Misery of a Forgotten War : Kabul: Rival factions continue to clash daily in the country’s besieged capital. After 15 years, no end of the fighting is in sight.

Call it the Kabul wake-up call.

Well before the sun rises over the jagged, snowcapped mountains of the Hindu Kush, the gunmen of Kabul fire their screeching rockets. They unleash a mighty thunder, jolt the population from slumber and send hearts racing into overdrive.

By daybreak, jet fighters are roaring through the skies, machine guns are crackling and the long-suffering people of Kabul are braced for another nightmarish day of urban warfare in one of the most brutal wars in the world.

Some of the most intense day-to-day combat in the world is in the Afghan capital, where rebellious Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his ally, warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, reignited a simmering civil war with a blistering assault on the capital at 4 a.m. last New Year’s Day. The guns have blazed ever since.

Despite the relentless rocket attacks, Hekmatyar’s troops have been pushed back several miles to the southern and eastern fringes of the city and have virtually no chance of driving President Burhanuddin Rabbani from the Presidential Palace.

The sheer routine of the stalemated war is best illustrated by the daily battles in the southwestern corner of the city. The president’s men are fighting from the abandoned Dehmazang Prison, separated from Hekmatyar’s forces by a few hundred yards and crumbling buildings that now look like ancient ruins.

The acting commander of the presidential force, Syed Kadar Shah, lives and works in a dank, cramped former prison cell. Shafts of light filter through the window bars and highlight the smoke from the cigarettes that never leave his right hand.

Incessant bursts of gunfire drown out his words, yet he sits like a man at a picnic, his legs casually crossed as he talks about the roaring battle across the street.

“This is normal. The shooting has been like this here every day for the past seven weeks,” said Shah. “When the rockets land in the streets, people are killed all the time. But we are safe here.”

His words fail to reassure. Every wall of the prison has been hit. Many have collapsed into heaps of rubble, or have gaping holes punched by mortars and rockets.

Shah is not worried. He pulls back his right sleeve to show several dark scars left by shrapnel. He points to his left shoulder where a bullet once ripped off a chunk of flesh.

Now 37, Shah was a young man when he became a guerrilla in the war to evict Soviet troops from Afghanistan. That enemy has been vanquished and now he is a prominent commander in the presidential army. Yet Shah finds himself barricaded inside a prison under constant attack and without a clue as to when he will get out.

He is a prisoner of war, a metaphor that extends to most everyone in Afghanistan.

The Islamic holy warriors, or moujahedeen , were national heroes and somewhat united when they drove out Soviet forces in 1989 and toppled a communist Afghan government in April, 1992.

The ferociously independent guerrillas quickly turned their guns on each other in a fight for control of Kabul. Nine separate factions are involved in the civil war, and today the fighters are widely reviled as ruthless killers by helpless civilians, who account for most of the city’s estimated 30,000 dead and wounded this year.

No faction is powerful enough to win an outright military victory and all peace efforts have collapsed. All factions want an Islamic government, and the feud is seen as little more than a raw struggle for power among a handful of warlords.

Hekmatyar, a fiery Islamic fundamentalist, was named prime minister last year in an attempted compromise, but he has yet to set foot in Kabul. He wants Rabbani replaced as president by a neutral interim government that would hold elections.

Rabbani, a reclusive, soft-spoken academic with a flowing white beard, says he will step down to make way for a loya jirga , or a council of leaders, who would choose a future government.

A United Nations special envoy, Mehmood Mestiri, has been flying in and out of Afghanistan from his base in neighboring Pakistan in a bid to reconcile the positions, but the forecast is for continued fighting.

Soldiers on both sides are dug in and rarely risk ground assaults, preferring to heave rockets at one another from a safe distance, though they often miss their targets.

The front lines seldom change, which allows Hekmatyar to maintain his headquarters in Charasyab, only 15 miles south of the Presidential Palace in downtown Kabul.

It is the civilians who suffer.

Mohammed Ajmal, 12, has been lying in the Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital for a month with shrapnel embedded in his chest. He was flying a kite in his yard when a rocket hit.

The doctors have no plans to operate at present because the main chest surgeon has left the country and the hospital lacks oxygen required for such surgery.

“We haven’t seen kindness from any of the military groups,” said Shah Jahn, Mohammed’s mother. “All the military sides are our enemies.”

More than 250,000 people--one-fourth of Kabul’s population--have fled the city, most settling in refugee camps on rocky, wind-swept plains near the eastern city of Jalalabad.

Almost all foreign organizations have pulled out of Kabul, except for a few determined aid groups, led by the International Red Cross.

The Red Cross’ administrative house was so badly damaged by shelling that the group had to move earlier this year. Its cars have been hijacked on the presidential side of the front. On Hekmatyar’s side, Red Cross food and medicine convoys have been stopped from entering the city.

Peter Stocker, head of the Red Cross delegation, said his group is now out of 30 of 180 essential items for their medical work.

“The knife is to our neck,” said Stocker. “We spend weeks negotiating with one commander. Then he’s not there when our trucks come through and they get held up.”

Rabbani’s nominal government barely functions, there is no formal economy and food prices have skyrocketed. The city’s commercial center, along the Kabul River in the southeast, has been smashed into a huge pile of brown bricks. It is devoid of people, except for shepherds who bring their flocks to nibble on the grass along the river bank.

But Afghans are legendary survivors and have adapted their behavior to deal with rockets.

When shells begin pounding one area, a street will clear instantly. Shop owners close their shutters. Vegetable sellers push their carts of tomatoes and carrots around the corner. Three streets away, business carries on uninterrupted.

But the main business of Kabul is still fighting.

“Being a soldier is the only way to make money,” said Jhan Agha, a 17-year-old government fighter who gets the equivalent of $15 a month and makes three times that amount collecting “taxes” at his checkpoint.