Then came the bombs–two, five, eight, dozens, each one punching the solar plexus with a shock wave, and plowing up enormous clouds of dust and black smoke over Taliban trenches only 800 yards away.
“Allahu Akbar!” cheered the ragged mujahedeen of the rebel Northern Alliance: God is Great!
And with that, the attack on Afghanistan’s capital began shortly after noon Monday–a swift, wicked battle of tank duels, rocket barrages and machine-gun exchanges all playing out in a maze of mud-walled alleyways and vineyards in abandoned frontline villages.
“We will drink tea in Kabul tomorrow morning, if God wills it,” said Basir Khan, a rebel commander whose 300 men spearheaded the attack along a small stretch of this ragged front north of the capital city.
Heedless of enemy fire, he then strode out across no-man’s land toward Kabul, a teenage adjutant and a rifle-toting midget, apparently a bodyguard, in tow.
Such bravado sums up three extraordinary days in the military campaign to topple Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, with rebel forces sweeping out of their remote mountain strongholds in the northeast on Friday and capturing major cities ever since, from Mazar-e Sharif in the north to Herat in the west, according to rebels.
Bolstered by intense U.S. bombing, the Northern Alliance finally broke through Taliban lines on the strategic Kabul front on Monday, and, in a lightning advance, rebels claimed to have pushed to within 4 miles of the city’s outskirts by the end of the day. At dawn Tuesday, witnesses reported seeing rebel forces enter Kabul after Taliban troops abandoned the city.
On Monday, Northern Alliance officials promised to adhere to a plan, hammered out by the United States and other Afghan factions, to stay out of the city until a new, broad-based government could be cobbled together.
“We don’t want to see any fighting inside Kabul,” the Northern Alliance foreign minister, Abdullah, insisted at a triumphant press conference Monday night. “We don’t want to create a perception that we are back to seek power for ourselves.”
Rebels sighted in capital
But rebel forces were seen moving into the capital in pickup trucks loaded with soldiers armed with rifles and rocket launchers early Tuesday.
On Monday, at the destroyed frontline village of Rabat, blond strangers with military-style haircuts sat atop mud-brick houses, calling in U.S. air strikes for Afghan fighters who paused to spread their blankets in the dust only a few blocks away, praying toward Mecca before combat.
“They are very effective, very accurate,” commander Khan said of the U.S. military spotters, who refused to speak with reporters. “We would not be able to do this without them.”
Standing on a rooftop a half a mile from Taliban positions, the rebel chief tapped his watch and looked skyward.
On cue, the contrails of a B-52 appeared overhead, flying from its Indian Ocean air base of Diego Garcia. The plane circled, and seconds later huge detonations erupted over the Shomali Plain, echoing off the surrounding foothills of Hindu Kush mountains. Taliban trucks could be seen racing away from the targeted trenches.
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Khan’s men cheered, and then they set off on foot toward the Taliban, walking in silence down mud-walled lanes designed for horse wagons.
In a pattern of clan warfare that goes back centuries, every soldier in Khan’s unit was from the same town, Salong, and most had been fighting together for years in Afghanistan’s seemingly endless cycle of wars.
Most wore the baggy pants and tunics of rural Afghan farmers. And while the battlefield for the B-52 pilots was a dry, almost lunar plain some 40 miles across, with the dusty prize of Kabul sprawling behind some hills to the south, for Abdul Mahfuz, it was an aspen turning yellow.
`They are shooting at us’
“That is our tree,” said Mahfuz, one of Khan’s squad leaders who cajoled and berated his men into attack positions while smaller U.S. fighter-bombers began roaring overhead, dropping single bombs on individual Taliban tanks or trucks. He pointed to a greener tree 200 yards away: That one was Taliban.
“They are shooting at us from a canal there,” he said merrily.
Kalashnikov rifle fire began popping from across a weedy field. Taliban bullets cracked through the air; the alliance infantrymen sauntered behind a mud wall for cover. Even when Taliban tank shells and rockets began hurtling down with the sound of a ripping bed sheet, many of the men simply crouched to continue conversations.
“These guys breathe war,” said Daniel Byman, an Afghanistan expert with the Rand think tank’s Center for Middle East Public Policy. “And they always fight at the squad level, no matter how big the battle.”
Monday’s sprawling assault on Kabul was no different.
Though Northern Alliance spokesmen claimed that some 6,000 soldiers took part in coordinated attacks across dozens of miles of front lines, every unit of a dozen or so men fought as though they were taking on an equally tiny group of Taliban across no-man’s land.
Lackadaisical fighting
At times the combat was comically lackadaisical, with columns getting lost in the alleyways of ruined villages, or simply sitting to eat a lunch of flat bread and mutton while rockets pulverized the empty houses around them. Khan’s unit included a lone Russian tank. It dueled with a similarly decrepit Taliban tank across no-man’s land, finally forcing it to withdraw.
Meanwhile, the Shomali Plain was obscured in the late afternoon by the dust raised by dozens of air strikes. And here lay the secret to the Northern Alliance’s apparent conquest of much of Afghanistan.
Instead of using their cheap walkie-talkies merely to communicate across their shell-pocked villages, the fighters’ pleas filtered back to the most powerful air force in the world.
A jovial rebel leader
Minutes after Mahfuz, the jovial rebel squad leader, was blocked by the Taliban canal, a B-52 dumped six bombs directly on the site, shaking the earth. Mahfuz led his men to the next strong-point, holding his walkie-talkie heavenward like a torch.
Khan jogged ahead of him, a rakish figure in designer sunglasses and a neatly pressed Russian uniform, one rebel commander among scores pushing toward Kabul.
Breaching the first Taliban trench, he immediately began shouting into his walkie-talkie to stop the Americans from bombing the area. The Taliban had fled in a hurry. They left behind a warm fire, a tin bowl of rice and a cache of rockets in their command post.
It was getting late. The Americans had called it a day. Jubilant rebels were firing their rocket-propelled grenades into the air, signaling more Taliban trenches captured. But Khan and Mahfuz didn’t pause.
As the sun set, they marched their ragged men south across the torn battlefield, past threads of black smoke from burning tanks, to the darkening hills above Kabul.