Muslim Militia Tightens Grip on Afghan Capital

The Taliban militia, now the uncontested masters of Afghanistan’s capital, chased the soldiers of ousted President Burhanuddin Rabbani north of Kabul on Friday and began putting in effect its version of strict Islamic rule.

Women were barred from offices until further notice and told to wear traditional Islamic veils when outside the home, reports reaching this city near the Afghan-Pakistan border said.

On official Kabul Radio, now in the hands of the Talibs, a religious scholar told his fellow citizens that adulterers and those who drink alcohol should be killed.

“God says that those committing adultery should be stoned to death,” Mullah Agha Gulabi said. “Anybody who drinks and says that it is not against the Koran, you have to kill him and hang his body for three days until people say this is the body of the drinker who did not obey the Koran and Allah’s order.”

Less than two years after their formation in southeastern Afghanistan, the Taliban--made up originally of students from Muslim religious schools but whose ranks have been joined by veterans of the Islamic holy wars against the Soviets--swept into Kabul from all directions about 1 a.m. Friday.

They dragged former President Najibullah, who led Afghanistan’s former pro-Soviet government until its demise in April 1992, and his brother and former security chief, Shahpur Ahmadzai, from a U.N. compound and killed them.

The bullet-riddled, bruised body of Najibullah was hoisted on a wire noose outside the presidential palace. Afghans gathered by the hundreds to cheer and shout abuse at the corpse.

“He was a killer of Afghan people. He was against Islam. He was a criminal, and he was a Communist,” Mullah Mohammed Rabbani said. He is unrelated to the president but is a member of the provisional six-member Taliban council appointed Friday to govern in Kabul. “This was his punishment.”

During Najibullah’s six-year rule, which ended when anti-Communist moujahedeen besieged the capital, Afghans by the tens of thousands were arrested, tortured and murdered. Blocked at Kabul airport when he tried to flee to exile abroad, the burly Najibullah, a former medical student who once led the feared and hated state security service, took up refuge in the U.N. compound that was his home until his death.

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Najibullah and his brother had been guarded by government soldiers, but the soldiers fled as the Talibs closed in on Kabul’s center, U.N. spokeswoman Sylvana Foa said in New York.

The Taliban’s seizure of war-shattered Kabul, home to an estimated 750,000 residents and impoverished Afghans displaced by fighting elsewhere in the country, was the spectacular climax to a lightning campaign that began two weeks ago with the capture of the strategic eastern city of Jalalabad.

Government officials and soldiers fled Kabul by the thousands on Thursday, as did Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former professor of Islamic law, and his military chief, Ahmed Shah Masoud.

Taliban sources told an Afghan news service in Pakistan that their fighters were pursuing forces of the ousted government north of the capital on Friday and were fighting at Charikar, capital of Parvan province.

The exact whereabouts of Rabbani and other top leaders of the deposed regime were unknown. The Afghan Islamic Press quoted a statement issued by Rabbani from an undisclosed location as appealing to faction leaders and the Afghan people to resist the insurgents.

Masoud Khalili, the Rabbani government’s ambassador to India, said government forces were planning a counterattack and claimed that the pullback from Kabul was a tactical move. The Taliban now hold about two-thirds of Afghanistan.

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The Taliban moved rapidly to reassure jittery Kabul residents that they had nothing to fear from their new rulers. Messages broadcast over loudspeakers on the streets urged people to go about their business and promised them a restoration of peace and order.

Many shops reopened, even though Friday was the Muslim holy day, and the sun-washed streets bustled with pedestrians, cars and bicyclists.

Some residents told reporters that they were cheered by the prospect of an end to the wearying years of street battles and rocket salvos.

Others expressed worry over the Talibs’ puritanical brand of Islam, which rejects music, television and education for girls and imposes punishments including amputations and executions.

In Washington, the State Department urged Kabul’s new masters to restore order in a city pounded into ruins by four years of fighting among moujahedeen factions and to form a representative interim government to help the process of national reconciliation.

The Taliban, whose goal is the disarming of all the country’s warring factions, rejected any notion of power-sharing.

“We call upon the international community to recognize us as the government of the Islamic state of Afghanistan,” spokesman Wakil Ahmed said.

Pakistan, which has backed the Taliban with military equipment and training, gave the first signal of foreign acceptance of the new regime Friday by announcing that it will send a team of officials to Kabul for talks.

The Taliban earlier announced an amnesty for all government soldiers and officers who surrendered. But military leaders could face the same fate as Najibullah if caught.

On Friday, the Taliban branded President Rabbani, Ahmed Masoud and Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar “national criminals” for not accepting the offer of amnesty and giving themselves up.