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62 TALIBAN2,500 Taliban, who had remained behind in the north, from capturingthe city of Kunduz which had an airport. The Taliban reinforced thisenclave with daily flights of men and materials from Kabul. While Malikcould not or would not drive the Taliban out of the north, Masud wasmoving closer to Kabul.In mid-July, Masud broke the military stalemate north of Kabul, byrecapturing Charikar and the Bagram airbase, killing hundreds more Talibantroops. By September, Masud's forces were once again positioned only20 miles from Kabul. Both sides traded artillery and rocket bombardments,which forced nearly 180,000 civilians to flee the lush Shomali valley justnorth of Kabul and now on the front line. As the Taliban retreated fronjthe Shomali, they poisoned water wells and blew up small irrigation channelsand dams in a bid to ensure that the local Tajik population wouldnot return in a hurry. The war was now not just uprooting and killingcivilians, but destroying their very means of livelihood and turningKabul's agricultural belt into a wasteland.The anti-Taliban alliance had now created a huge 180-degree arc thatsurrounded Kabul. To the west and north of the city were Masud's forceswhile to the east and south were Khalili's Hazaras. As speculationmounted that they may launch an attack on Kabul, the Taliban remainedconfident that the opposition was too divided to attack Kabul. 'We havedivided the opposition into two parts by putting our forces into Kunduz,The northern groups are disunited against each other. The other Uzbekgenerals cannot rely on Malik. He has already betrayed them once andnow he is just trying to save himself. No group has enough forces to fightthe Taliban on their own, so they have to try and unite but theynever unite,' said Haqqani. 10Doubts about Malik's loyalty to the alliance appeared to be justified,when in September the Taliban force in Kunduz took him by surprise^The Taliban broke out of their Kunduz enclave and with the help ofPashtun tribes in the area launched another attack on Mazar. On 7 September1997 they captured the town of Tashkhorgan, creating panic ir*Mazar. As the Taliban advanced on Mazar, heavy fighting broke outbetween Uzbek troops loyal to Malik and others loyal to Dostum. Malik'shouse was burnt down by Dostum's troops and he fled to his base in Faryabprovince and then escaped to Turkmenistan from where he went on toIran.In a dramatic turnaround, Dostum returned to Mazar from exileTurkey and rallied his troops to defeat Malik's supporters and pushTaliban out of the Mazar region. Mazar descended into chaos asUzbeks again looted parts of the city and the offices of UN aid agenciforcing humanitarian aid-workers to abandon Mazar for the second tiin a year. As the Taliban retreated they massacred at least 70 Shia HazaMAZAR-E^SHARIF 1997: MASSACRE IN THE NORTH ~ 63in Qazil Abad, a village south of Mazar, and perhaps hundreds more. 'TheTaliban swept through this village like storm. They killed about 70people, some had their throats slit, while others were skinned alive,' saidSohrab Rostam, a survivor of the massacre. 11With the Taliban retreating back to Kunduz, Dostum tried to consolidatehis position, but Mazar was now virtually taken over by Hazara groupsand Dostum was forced to abandon the Uzbek capital and set up hisbase in Shiberghan. Acute tensions between the Uzbeks and the Hazarasundermined the anti-Taliban alliance and Dostum still had to win overMalik's supporters. He did so by exposing the atrocities committed byMalik. Dostum's troops unearthed 20 mass graves near Shebarghan in theDash-te-Laili desert in Jowzjan province where more than 2,000 Talibanprisoners of war had been massacred and buried. Dostum accused Malikof the massacres, offered the Taliban help to retrieve the bodies and calledin the UN to investigate. He released some 200 Taliban prisoners as agesture of goodwill. 12Subsequent UN investigations revealed that the prisoners had beentortured and starved before dying. 'The manner of their death was horrendous.Prisoners were taken from detention, told they were going to beexchanged and then trucked to wells often used by shepherds, which heldabout 10 to 15 metres of water. They were thrown into the wells eitheralive or if they resisted, shot first and then tossed in. Shots were fired andhand grenades were exploded into the well before the top was bulldozedover.' said UN Special Rapporteur Paik Chong-Hyun who inspected thegraves. 13Later there were eye-witness reports which made it clear that viciousethnic cleansing had taken place, 'At night when it was quiet and dark,we took about 150 Taliban prisoners, blindfolded them, tied their handsbehind their backs and drove them in truck containers out to the desert.We lined them up, ten at a time, in front of holes in the ground andopened fire. It took about six nights,' said General Saleem Sahar, anofficer loyal to Malik, who had been arrested by Dostum. 14 The use ofcontainers was particularly horrific and they were to be used increasinglyas a method of killing by both sides. 'When we pulled the bodies out ofthe containers, their skin was burned black from the heat and the lack ofoxygen,' said another of Malik's generals, who added that 1,250 Talibanhad died a container death.The catastrophe in the north and the heavy fighting that followedthrough the summer only further widened the ethnic divide in Afghanistanbetween the Pashtun Taliban and the non-Pashtuns. The country wasnow virtually split along north-south lines and also along Pashtun andnon-Pashtun lines. All sides had carried out ethnic cleansing and religiousPersecution. The Taliban had massacred Shia Hazara villagers and forced