Front Line Now Haven for Taliban

Each evening just after sundown, convoys of heavily armed Taliban fighters push out of their bases in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and drive to the safest place they know: the front line.

Their enemies across the battle line, the Northern Alliance, watch the headlights of trucks and vans pulling up as close as they can.

In Afghanistan’s vicious civil war, the front line may seem an odd place to hide. But to the Taliban fighters defending Kabul, the closer they are to the front line, the farther they are from U.S. missiles raining down on the capital.

“They go in convoys of pickup trucks like Datsuns. They wear turbans, and their eyes are painted with kohl. They have grenade launchers and Kalashnikovs and all kinds of other weapons,” said Sharifullah, 20, a moujahedeen with the anti-Taliban opposition. Sharifullah, speaking in a teahouse in Jabal os Saraj, 45 miles north of Kabul, was in the capital Tuesday morning and crossed to the opposition-held northern territory the same day.

Each night of U.S. strikes has brought an intense exchange of fire between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban fighters pressed toward the front line. But so far, the anti-Taliban forces have used their most powerful weapon, Grad multiple-rocket launchers, only sparingly.

The Northern Alliance fighters are somewhat hamstrung by a shortage of weaponry, mainly because of the difficulty in getting supplies to their valley in the remote northern region.

Sharifullah arrived in the northern town of Gulbahar about 6 p.m. Tuesday as the bazaar was closing and the last donkeys were heading home. He was waiting at a bus stop with two others from Kabul, looking for a ride to the front-line town of Charikar, about an hour away.

As he was leaving Kabul, Sharifullah said, he saw some of the damage caused by the U.S. missile strikes. The airport was in ruins, as was the TV tower and the radio center.

Sharifullah said the Taliban fighters in the nightly convoys appeared more subdued than usual. They weren’t singing, chanting or playing religious music on their radios as they often do.

“That’s how I knew they were scared,” said Sharifullah.

Support for the Taliban from ordinary Afghans appears to be dwindling. In Kabul, “people were screaming at the Talibs, ‘It’s all because of you!’ ” he said, referring to U.S. strikes against the militia.

He said some of the Taliban fighters retreated to mountain hide-outs and returned to the city during the day.

“At sundown you can see their cars approach the front line, building up their positions,” Northern Alliance commander Gen. Bobojan said Tuesday in Bagram, a key opposition post. “And in the morning before sunrise, as soon as the bombing stops, they go back.

“That’s how they raise their morale and spirits. At night, they strengthen their front line. In the daytime, they’re having a great time, walking around Kabul, saying, ‘Let the Americans bomb, we’re not scared.’ ”

Sharifullah said that after the first night of bombing, Taliban fighters knocked on the doors of every house in his village, Arghandi, 13 miles west of Kabul, and ordered each family to contribute one man to fight on the front line for the Taliban.

Sharifullah is a Pushtun, the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan, accounting for 38% of the population. Most Taliban members are Pushtun, so it’s easier for him to leave the city than it is for ethnic Tajiks, who face discrimination and harassment from the Taliban.

Another Pushtun from Kabul, medical student Abdul Marouf, 19, said that since the U.S. strikes began, the Taliban had stepped up its campaign to press-gang young men in Kabul to fight a jihad, or holy war.

“They were arresting people before,” he said, “but in the last days it got worse.”

Sharifullah was waiting for a ride out of Kabul on the second night of airstrikes. About 150 desperate people were crowded into the bus station, looking for cars or buses out of the city.

“They were bombing all night. We were scared the bombs would fall on us. Children, women and old men were shaking with fear. No one could sleep,” he said. “People were praying that it would be over soon and that we’d survive.”

Marouf, the student, was at home with nine members of his family.

“There was nowhere to hide. We have no basement. We were all reading the Koran and praying, all 10 of us,” he said. “It was terrible. It was frightening.”

The university where he studies medicine is closed because of the bombing.

“Everybody is running away, and so did I,” said the student, who left Kabul with Sharifullah and another young Pushtun named Aslan, 21. Marouf has no plans to go back to Kabul “until the war is over.”

Some shops in Kabul are still open during the day, but few people have money to buy anything.

Kabul Radio, the Taliban’s official station, broadcast recent comments by Osama bin Laden, believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The report claimed that not a single Taliban fighter had been hurt in the U.S. campaign. But most people weren’t listening to Kabul Radio, glued instead to the BBC, Radio Tehran and Voice of America.

In the bazaars and teahouses of Kabul, Sharifullah said, the morale among some Taliban supporters didn’t seem high.

Even a Taliban loyalist who quoted Bin Laden, saying everyone should join the fight against the Northern Alliance, appeared in low spirits, he said.

Marouf said not all Pushtuns are better off under the Taliban.

“For Pushtuns who oppose the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, life is difficult,” he said. “It’s only easy for those who support the Taliban. Life is easiest of all for Arabs and Pakistanis. They do whatever they like in Kabul, whatever they like.”

The Taliban forces include some tough, often fanatical fighters from Pakistan, Russia’s separatist republic of Chechnya and Arab countries.

With the Taliban now on the defensive, stories of the regime’s brutality are emerging.

Since the Taliban came to power in 1996, Sharifullah said, life has become nightmarish. He said there have been many cases of Taliban officers arresting people and beating or killing them.

“They beat people. They arrest people. They send them to the front line. They make you dig trenches. They can even kill you,” he said.

About a month ago in Arghandi, Taliban officers came to arrest a young opposition fighter, he said.

The man fled with his weapon. His father, Razakhan, who was in his 70s, told the officers that his son had left and that he did not know where he had gone. The Taliban officers ordered him to surrender his son’s weapon, but he could not.

“They dragged him out of his house and took him to a deserted house at the end of the village with no roof,” Sharifullah said. “They beat him and beat him with pieces of cable. Women, children and old men were standing not far from the house, and they could hear his screams.

“They were stroking the beards of the Taliban,” he said, “begging on their knees that they spare his life.”

In Afghanistan, stroking the beard of a dominant, armed man is a gesture of submission and desperation, a plea for mercy.

When the father was finally freed, his family gently laid him on his bed mat on the floor. But he lived only 10 or 15 minutes more.

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Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report. Dixon and Loiko reported from Afghanistan.