Taliban Fires on Bazaar; 2 Sellers Die

Unbowed by limited U.S. airstrikes, Taliban troops fired rockets from their mountain hide-outs into the middle of a crowded noontime bazaar here Tuesday, killing an impoverished, legless tea seller and a prosperous shopkeeper.

The Afghan men died as the airstrikes set off new clashes between the opposition Northern Alliance and the Taliban regime, which is still a powerful enemy after more than two weeks of bombing.

The recent airstrikes on the front line north of Kabul, the Afghan capital, are often described outside the country as intense and relentless, but to Afghans hardened by almost 23 years of war, they are intermittent pinpricks.

Bombing raids that began along the front line closest to Kabul on Sunday usually last less than an hour and have occurred only twice a day, at most. That leaves the Taliban troops a lot of time to regroup and take out their revenge on Afghan civilians, said Bari Yali, a shop owner who survived the rocket attack on Charikar.

“As long as the Taliban are in these mountains, they will continue to attack us,” Yali, 30, said as he stood next to a small crater that a rocket had dug in a narrow dirt alley. “They attacked Charikar because the Americans bombed them. If the American planes don’t bomb constantly, the Taliban will only fire at us more and more.”

Two U.S. warplanes returned at about 3 p.m. Tuesday to strike the Taliban front line, but after a few bombing runs, they were gone again, and there was no letup in the sporadic firing across the front line.

One of the jets fired off flares from the rear to confuse any heat-seeking missiles the Taliban might fire. Opposition soldiers watching the attacks from the village of Sinjit Dara, near the Bagram air base, said the Taliban still has surface-to-air missiles in the area.

When warplanes came back at about 6:40 p.m., they circled for several minutes, and as Taliban antiaircraft guns opened up, the jets left without counterattacking. They returned several times before midnight, with what sounded like a propeller-driven spotter plane to search for targets. But the jets didn’t drop any bombs.

Northern Alliance soldiers confirmed that at least two of the bombs dropped by U.S. F/A-18 fighter jets Monday afternoon fell in their territory, not the Taliban’s. Although no one was injured, several Northern Alliance troops were almost hit, soldiers said in interviews.

Gen. Haji Mohammed Almas, commander of the front-line soldiers who were nearly hit, said he found the “friendly fire” from his new allies very amusing, but frustrating just the same.

“It didn’t have any effect on the Taliban, but it didn’t have any effect on us, either,” Almas said, and he laughed. “When the Russians were here, they bombed us from morning until night.”

Witnesses to the Taliban rocket attack at about noon Tuesday identified the two victims as Aqa Shareen, a man who had lost both legs in a mine blast and eked out a living selling tea at the roadside, and Sheik Rasul, who owned a vegetable shop.

Sixteen people were injured in Charikar, the largest town near Kabul that is under Northern Alliance control.

The body of Rasul, who was well-off by the standards of Afghanistan’s ruined economy, lay in the courtyard of his walled home, under a canopy of grapevines. His gray beard was smeared with dried blood. A nephew leaned over to gently kiss the corpse as a woman cloaked in a blue burka, the traditional covering for Afghan women, was escorted into a small room where mourners wailed behind a locked door.

A man lifted the white shroud from Rasul’s face and waved it back and forth to chase away the flies that only swirled around in a cloud and descended again.

Shareen was taken to his remote village of Babakhil, where his family laid him to rest in the place of his birth. A Taliban rocket slashed through an electrical wire, hit a tree and exploded just yards from him at about noon Tuesday.

The blast sprayed shrapnel down the alley where Shareen was sitting on the ground, between a mosque and a house, selling tea with sugar for pennies a glass.

The night before, Northern Alliance troops had unleashed a barrage of rocket and artillery fire on the Taliban front lines after the latest wave of U.S. airstrikes ended.

“Our walkie-talkie was on when the airplanes came, and our commander told us to fire,” said Abdul Mobin, 20, a Northern Alliance soldier at the controls of a rocket launcher mounted on the back of a Russian-made vehicle.

Mobin fired five of the rockets at Taliban troops in the village of Kalai Dastagul, about a mile and a half away. The Taliban fired three rockets back, but they exploded more than half a mile away, Mobin said.

The Northern Alliance fire had no more effect on the Taliban than the U.S.-led airstrikes, and neither side advanced an inch on the ground. But after two years on the front line, Mobin said, he finally feels that the war is turning his way.

“The situation has changed,” he said. “Now the American planes are on our side, and if they keep bombing, we can easily advance.”

But even with help from above, the alliance will have a hard time defeating the Taliban, which is better armed and trained thanks to several years of support from neighboring Pakistan.

Mobin doesn’t have power in the small farmhouse where he bunks next to his rocket launcher, so he must wait for fresh batteries to arrive by bicycle each day in order to turn on his radio and wait for orders to open fire.

The Taliban began shooting rockets from the Ghorban Mountains and the Shomali plains below at about 8 a.m. Tuesday. Northern Alliance troops held their fire until 10:40 a.m., when a tank opened up on the Taliban-held village of Aster Gache, at the base of the mountains.

Just over an hour later, as shell after shell exploded in and around the village, the Taliban fired two rockets at Charikar.

About two miles from Aster Gache, three shipping containers blocked the main road, marking the end of the line for vehicles heading south toward Kabul. A steady stream of horse-drawn buggies arrived full of families and soldiers returning to front-line villages, despite the continued fighting.

Pari Jan was covered by a burka. Her 6-month-old son slept on her shoulder, and three small children sat at her feet. Her brother, Sher Zaid, 16, came as her escort.

They were heading home to the village of Jawar Sang, close to the front line, despite the obvious risk of getting caught in the cross-fire. She has lived with the danger so long, she said, it doesn’t matter anymore.

“I am worried about my children,” she said through the heavy screen of her veil. “But what else can we do but go home? We have nowhere else to go.”