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samim

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May 21, 1997, 3:00:00 AM5/21/97

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Russian border guards kill two on Afghan border
 02:04 a.m. May 21, 1997 Eastern

DUSHANBE, May 21 (Reuter) - Russian border guards shot dead two armed
men trying to cross into Tajikistan from neighboring Afghanistan, a spokesman
for the Russian border troops in
 Tajikistan said on Wednesday.

The spokesman in the Tajik capital Dushanbe said the two had been trying
to cross the Pyandzh
 river, which marks part of the border in the south of the country,
on Tuesday. They were backed by gunfire from Afghan territory.

Around 20,000 Russian peacekeepers and border guards serve in Tajikistan,
viewing themselves as a shield against militant Islam spreading northwards
from Afghanistan.

The ceasefire agreed last year between Tajikistan's secular government
and a united Islamist
 opposition is often disturbed by maverick armed bands and drug traders
operating out of their bases in Afghanistan.

On Tuesday Tajikistan's senior security officials -- worried by reports
that the purist Islamist Taleban militia was advancing in northern Afghanistan
-- held an urgent meeting to work out measures to reinforce the border
and prevent a possible influx of refugees from Afghanistan.
 
<HR WIDTH="100%">
 Afghan Taleban report advance on four province
 09:50 a.m. May 21, 1997 Eastern

By Sayed Salahuddin

KABUL, May 21 (Reuter) - Afghanistan's Islamic Taleban militia and their
new allies who mutinied against northern opposition leader General Abdul
Rashid Dostum advanced on four provinces on Wednesday, a Taleban spokesman
said.

The spokesman, quoted by a Pakistan-based private Afghan news service,
said the mutineers were now ``part of our Islamic army'' whose units were
advancing towards Dostum's home province of Jowzjan and the nearby Samangan
province.

He said the push by the Islamic army was also continuing in the northern
province of Baghlan and the central province of Bamiyan, according to the
Afghan Islamic Press (AIP).

Dostum on Wednesday replaced the mutinous commander who proclaimed an
uprising this week in favour of the fundamentalist Taleban, diplomatic
sources in Kabul said.

They said Dostum had appointed Alen Razem, a former air force commander,
to replace General
 Abdul Malik as governor of Faryab, west of Dostum's stronghold of Mazar-i-Sharif.

Witnesses said Mazar-i-Sharif was generally calm and the Afghan currency,
the Afghani, had
 bounced back to 68,000 to the dollar after touching a low of about
90,000 on Tuesday.

It remains unclear how much territory Dostum has lost to Malik's forces
or the Taleban since the
 mutiny began early on Monday, and there have been few reports of heavy
fighting.

However, the revolt against Dostum has given the Taleban a new chance
to defeat their opponents and impose their rule throughout a land wasted
by decades of war.

U.N. officials said there had been no sign that ordinary people had
been displaced by the latest
 turmoil in the north, but added they were on alert for any such movements.

AIP said Malik, in control of Maimana, the capital of Faryab province,
had handed over 700
 prisoners to the Taleban on Tuesday evening.

It said they were former Dostum fighters or members of Ittehad-i-Islami,
a Sunni Moslem guerrilla
 faction aligned with the former government led by president Burhanuddin
Rabbani.

AIP said the Taleban had demanded that Malik also hand over former Herat
provincial governor
 Ismail Khan, who had been fighting the Islamic militia in northwestern
Afghanistan.
 Khan, a renowned guerrilla commander, was forced to flee to Iran after
the Taleban captured Herat in September 1995.

Apart from Malik's seizure of Maimana, where white Taleban flags appeared
and Dostum portraits were torn down on Monday, the fate of other northern
provinces remains uncertain.

Malik, the brother of Rasul Pahlivan, a Dostum commander who was assassinated
in Mazar-i-Sharif last year, has accused Dostum of trying to split Afghanistan.

But his apparent pro-Taleban stance has puzzled observers, who see deep
differences between the ethnic Uzbeks of the north and the mainly Pashtun
Taleban.

Another disaffected Dostum commander, General Majid Rouzi, told the
British Broadcasting
 Corporation (BBC) on Tuesday that members of Dostum's Junbish-i-Milli
faction had decided to
 dislodge him because he was a ``national traitor.''

Dostum, who fought for the pro-communist government of the late president
Najibullah until 1992, has a history of switching his allegiances at critical
moments in Afghanistan.

He went over to the anti-Soviet mujahideen guerrillas in April 1992,
enabling them to take over
 Kabul from Najibullah.

He also staged an unsuccessful revolt, in alliance with former prime
minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, against Rabbani and his military chief, Ahmad
Shah Masood, in Kabul in January 1994.

Dostum then linked up with his old rival Masood and the Shi'ite Moslem
Hezb-i-Wahdat militia to
 form a loose military alliance after the Taleban captured Kabul in
September.

The northern alliance, said by the Taleban to receive support from Iran,
Uzbekistan and Russia, is
 the last force blocking the Taleban's ambition to impose their strict
interpretation of Islamic sharia
 law throughout Afghanistan.

The Taleban have made clear that an amnesty offered to their opponents
if they surrender will not
 apply to Dostum.

When the Taleban seized Kabul, one of their first actions was to hang
Najibullah, along with his
 brother, after seizing him from a U.N. compound where he had been staying.
 
<HR WIDTH="100%">
 <A NAME="WeeklyCommentary"></A>Our
weekly commentary<IMG SRC="contrib.gif" HEIGHT=16 WIDTH=101>
 
<HR WIDTH="100%">
 Afghans Cultivate Islamic State but Ignore Illicit
Harvest

By Kenneth J. Cooper
 Washington Post Foreign Service

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- After the Taliban militia
took control of Afghanistan's capital last
 September, its leaders vowed to establish the
most Islamic state in the world. Two months later, in
 the planting season in southern Afghanistan's
opium poppy fields, the fundamentalist militia denounced the flowering
crop used to produce heroin as un-Islamic.

But at the start of harvest time here in the Taliban's
southern stronghold, mature fields of white, pink and red poppies are in
bloom. They splash color even inside the war-damaged city of Kandahar,
the militia's headquarters, where one small plot flourishes across a dirt
road from the mud-walled central jail.

In the course of their nearly three-year-old fight
to rule Afghanistan, the Taliban's leaders have
 cracked down -- sometimes violently -- on the
people living in the two-thirds of the country that has come under their
control. The Muslim clerics and their followers have punished harshly women
in dress deemed immodest, men with cleanshaven chins, adulterers, thieves
and sports players.

But they have shown no such resolve with producers
of raw material for intoxicants clearly forbidden in the Koran, Islam's
holy book.

"There are no signs they have been doing anything,"
said Angus Geddes, a U.N. official working to persuade
Afghans to grow other crops.

According to the State Department and the United
Nations, Afghanistan harvests at least 30 percent of the world's opium
poppies. By the State Department's reckoning, that makes Afghanistan the
world's second-largest producer of opium poppies. The U.N. Drug Control
Program, using different survey methods, estimates that Afghanistan's output
now rivals Burma's as the largest.

More than 90 percent of Afghanistan's poppy-growing
areas are under Taliban control.

The country's biggest poppy-producing province,
Helmand, borders Kandahar Province to the east. Yet despite the Taliban's
professed religious convictions, it has not acted with customary zeal to
stop poppy cultivation. Its reluctance stems from the damage Afghanistan's
economy has suffered during nearly two decades of war, the revenue derived
from a 10 percent tax collected on opium and a fear of losing popular support
from hundreds of thousands of small growers of poppies.

"Everyone is growing poppy. If we try to stop
this immediately, the people will be against us," said
 Abdul Rashid, drug control director for Kandahar
Province.

Some Taliban leaders have suggested to U.N. officials
that they would be more inclined to enforce
 international anti-drug agreements and ban poppy
cultivation if the United Nations and Western
 nations recognized their fundamentalist regime,
which no government has done. The hints amount to a kind of narco-diplomacy
-- seeking international legitimacy while condoning trafficking in illegal
 drugs.

"I've heard that argument: Once we get recognition,
then we will deliver all the good things," said
 Norbert Holl, a U.N. mediator assigned to negotiate
an end to the ongoing civil war between the
 Taliban and an alliance of northern militias,
including the former government of president Burhanuddin Rabbani that the
Taliban drove from Kabul last year.

Rashid said the civil war was partly responsible
for the continuing poppy cultivation. "When we take control of the entire
country, we will stop it. In these days, we're too busy with the fighting,"
he said.

Rather than destroy easily identifiable poppy
fields and risk popular wrath, Rashid said, the Taliban has
adopted the more difficult strategy of intercepting drug shipments along
Afghanistan's 1,500-mile border with Pakistan and 580-mile border with
Iran. The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is particularly porous,
with many back roads winding through rugged terrain.

Afghanistan's poppy growers have ready buyers
who take the opium harvest to labs along the
 Pakistani border or inside Pakistan and Turkey,
where it is processed into heroin. Most Afghan
 heroin winds up in Europe, routed through Turkey,
Iran or Central Asia. Little reaches the United
 States, according to U.N. surveys.

Afghans do not consume much opium or heroin, though
hospital personnel in Kandahar said they
 occasionally discover surgical patients are addicts
because they need massive doses of anesthesia.
 The Taliban has enforced a ban on hashish, a
milder drug used by soldiers on both sides of the civil war.

For Afghan farmers, planting opium poppy on at
least part of their land represents a sensible choice in one of the world's
poorest countries, where small farming and undisguised smuggling appear
to be the major economic activities. Opium poppy pays more and requires
less water than other crops. It also reaps cash advances from buyers to
pay for fertilizer and seeds.

"That is the reason we are growing this -- to
make more money," explained Issa Khan as he shoveled mud to redirect the
flow of irrigation water to his blooming poppy fields. "Nobody has asked
us to stop this."

Farmers have grown poppy alongside wheat, fruit
trees and spices as insurance against the failure  of other crops
that need more water, which is scarce in many areas. Because he earns twice
as much from poppy as he does from wheat, Khan said he planted five acres
of poppy and four acres of wheat during the winter growing season that
is coming to an end. Wheat is the basic ingredient of a flat, unleavened
bread that is an Afghan staple.

Before the Soviet invasion in 1979, the farmland
seven miles west of Kandahar city that Khan and
 other poppy growers work was covered with grape
vineyards. Local farmers said they blame the
 Russians for the vineyards' destruction during
the decade-long war against the former Soviet army.

Ahmed Gul, another poppy grower from the area,
picked up a rusty mortar shell from a poppy field, walked over to foreign
journalists nearby and declared: "We are cultivating this because the Russians
used this weapon. Now, we are cultivating and exporting this as an atom
bomb."

Helmand Province, which produces about 60 percent
of the poppy crop, was the country's
 breadbasket until an extensive irrigation system
built with U.S. aid fell into disrepair -- like most of
 Afghanistan's infrastructure -- during two decades
of warfare. "There was all this wheat and all this
 cotton, and now it's all this poppy," William
Bergquist, a U.N. official based in Kandahar, said.

Geddes said the United Nations has tried to persuade
poppy growers they can make as much money from fruit orchards, onions and
other vegetables. Under another U.N. program, local leaders will be asked
to ban poppy cultivation in their areas in exchange for a development project
of their choice.

Both the State Department and the United Nations
have reported that the Taliban collects a 10
 percent tax on opium poppy.

Rashid denied the militia taxes poppy growers,
but said local Muslim clerics might receive the tithe.
 One Afghanistan specialist doubted the poppy
tax is a major revenue source for the Taliban, which  has
received the bulk of its war resources from other Islamic fundamentalists
in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates
and Bahrain.

In three verses, the Koran warns Muslims against
involvement with alcohol or drugs. The strongest
 language condemns intoxicants as "Satan's handiwork"
and admonishes Muslims to "eschew such
 abomination that ye may prosper."

The Taliban's lax enforcement of those Koranic
injunctions makes its regime less Islamic than in other Muslim countries
that show zero tolerance for illegal drugs. In Afghanistan, Rashid said,
the maximum penalty for drug trafficking is 20 years in prison. In Saudi
Arabia, whose version of Islam is similar to the Taliban's, it is death.
 
<HR WIDTH="100%">

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Taher

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May 29, 1997, 3:00:00 AM5/29/97

Talibans Suffers Losses in
Afghan

By KATHY GANNON
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, May 29, 1997 12:19 pm EDT

MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan (AP) -- Taliban
forces
suffered additional losses today in their
attempt to avenge a
humiliating defeat by former allies in the
battle for Afghanistan's
north.

Scores of Taliban soldiers were killed or
wounded in a battle
north of Kabul. Buses and cars were seen
evacuating the
wounded from Jebul Siraj to Kabul, the capital
60 miles to the
south.

Anti-Taliban forces loyal to former Afghan
defense chief Ahmed
Shah Masood captured the town of Golbahar and
the nearby
village of Sherqat at the mouth of the Panjshir
Valley, Taliban
soldiers admitted.

``This morning Masood launched a pre-dawn
attack'' and swiftly
took the two towns, said Ziarat Gul, a Taliban
soldier in Jebul
Siraj.

``A hundred troops from our group were in the
area when it was
attacked, but only five of them have returned
to us,'' he said. Gul
did not know the fate of the rest.

In New Delhi, the Afghan ambassador to India
claimed the
Taliban were pushed out of a wide swathe of
northern provinces,
which they had captured five days ago with the
help of defectors
from the anti-Taliban alliance.

A Taliban spokesman in Pakistan denied losing
more ground in the
north, however. The conflicting reports could
not be immediately
reconciled.

Taliban soldiers advanced on Mazar-e-Sharif
today, a regional
capital in the north, hoping to avenge their
defeat by former allies
in a fierce battle for northern Afghanistan
that left more than 100
people dead Wednesday.

Uzbek soldiers were said to be heading south to
try to block the
advance of the Taliban army, which lost the
city in an 18-hour
battle on Wednesday.

The defeat marked the first time since the
Islamic army began its
conquest of Afghanistan three years ago that it
had to retreat from
a city it had captured.

Wednesday's reversal at Mazar-e-Sharif came
when an Uzbek
general, an enemy-turned-ally, reneged on his
new alliance with
the Taliban when they tried to disarm his
troops.

New Taliban forces were moving through the
Salang pass in the
Hindu Kush mountains today, assembling in
Phul-i-Khumri, 100
miles south of Mazar-e-Sharif, for a possible
counteroffensive.

Fearing more fighting in the city, a U.N.
convoy evacuated scores
of foreign aid workers and journalists to the
Uzbekistan border,
35 miles north.

Residents started removing bloated and
fly-covered bodies today
from Mazar-e-Sharif's Saeedabad neighborhood,
where Taliban
soldiers had tried to disarm residents Tuesday.
The ensuing
skirmish drew in troops of the Uzbek ethnic
minority and led to an
uprising against the Taliban.

After the battle, Red Cross workers collected
the bodies of more
than 100 people killed in the fighting. Another
70 wounded were
treated at one hospital, said Jean-Luc
Palatini, a Red Cross
spokesman in Kabul.

Charred buildings and twisted and burned hulks
of trucks and
tanks littered the streets.

Resentment against the Taliban began building
in Mazar-e-Sharif
almost immediately after 3,000 Taliban fighters
-- most of them
ethnic Pashtuns -- descended Saturday upon the
city, which is
dominated by northern Uzbeks and Tajiks.

Ethnic tensions have fueled the prolonged
factional wars in
Afghanistan that have followed the expulsion of
the occupying
Soviets in 1989.

The Taliban troops were able to seize the north
after a revolt by
Uzbek soldiers against their commander,
northern warlord Rashid
Dostum. That gave them control of roughly 90
percent of the
country -- more than any regime since the
Soviet forces.

Malik Pahlawan, the renegade Uzbek general
whose revolt last
week against Dostum led to the Taliban capture
of
Mazar-e-Sharif, turned his back on the alliance
late Tuesday.

The Taliban -- an army of former Islamic
seminary students --
wants to transform the country into a hard-line
Islamic republic. It
has already imposed its harsh brand of Islam in
the two-thirds of
Afghanistan under its control, banning music
and movies,
forbidding women to work or go to school and
forcing men to
wear beards and go to the mosques.

The Taliban moves have sparked concern among
more secular,
neighboring countries.

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