Northern alliance soldiers ready to advance as front-line fighting rages

By Steven Gutkin

Associated Press

PULI KHUMRI HILL, Afghanistan – Artillery fire cracked incessantly Wednesday at a front-line outpost in northern Afghanistan, and fighters in an anti-Taliban alliance said they were eager to take advantage of the current U.S. assault to advance.

“We’re very happy. Now we can go farther and capture more Taliban posts,” said 40-year-old Mohammed moments after firing a round of ammunition at a Taliban outpost about 750 yards across a valley.

But the soldiers firing Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-launchers some 150 miles north of the Afghan capital, Kabul, said they have not yet received orders from their superiors to move forward.

Mohammed’s commander, Safiulla, who like many Afghans uses just one name, said he and 500 northern alliance fighters in this section of Afghanistan’s northern Takhar province are “waiting for orders” to attack.

Added 25-year-old fighter Sarwar Din: “Now we are stronger and they are weaker. We’ll use this opportunity to finish off the Taliban terrorists.”

The northern alliance, which has an estimated 15,000-20,000 soldiers in the 10 percent of Afghanistan it controls, has claimed a series of advances – including a number of defections by Taliban soldiers – since the terror attacks on the United States.

It’s difficult to verify those claims, however, and the Taliban, who have an estimated 40,000 fighters, have denied them. If the front line at Puli Khumri Hill is indicative of other regions of Afghanistan, there have likely been few significant changes on the ground since Sept. 11.

Here, the alliance and the Taliban fire at each other from two dusty hills overlooking the town of Quroq, whose 5,000 inhabitants fled a year ago because of the fighting. There has been no change in the front-line positions at Puli Khumri for at least two months, soldiers said.

The northern alliance, a grouping of ethnic minorities and warlords, is considered a key element of the current U.S. assault on the Taliban because of the intimate knowledge it possesses on the disposition of Taliban forces as well as their main bases and command-and-control mechanisms.

Alliance officials have said they would like to move into areas cleared by the U.S. assaults, but their general strategy in the face of the current conflict remains unclear.

So far, there have been no known joint operations between the alliance and the U.S. forces, possibly because disparities in training, equipment, operational procedures and language would make them difficult.

But military analysts say the alliance would be well-placed to offer the United States forward-staging bases – and possibly guides to make it through Afghanistan’s treacherous terrain – in the event of U.S. ground operations.

The United States says it’s been in close contact with the alliance on military matters.

But there would be great opposition both at home and abroad to the idea of the alliance taking power in Afghanistan because its members represent mostly minority interests and because of the havoc its leaders wreaked on the country before being ousted from power by the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban five years ago.

The alliance suffered a huge blow with last month’s death at the hands of suicide bombers of Ahmad Shah Massood, its charismatic military leader.

Nonetheless, initial pronouncements that the alliance could not survive without Massood gave way to the realization that it received a big boost after the attacks on New York and Washington.

With the Taliban harboring the prime suspect, Osama bin Laden, the ruling militia is the prime target of the international coalition against terror. And the alliance, because it opposes the Taliban, is receiving new support from the coalition.

Yet the ragtag nature of the alliance’s war was evident Wednesday on the hills of Takhar province. The soldiers wear neither fatigues nor uniforms, but knee-length shirts, baggy pants and turbans as they fire their Soviet-era weapons.

Less than a mile away from the front line, children play on the rocks and dust piles that serve as roads in this impoverished Central Asian country of 21 million people.

There was a lot of firing Wednesday, but it seemed no targets were hit on either side.

Alliance soldiers said the 5,000 residents of Quroq evacuated after Chechens, Arabs and Pakistanis allied with the Taliban took over the town and began raping women and killing men accused of sympathizing with the alliance.

There have been reports of such atrocities on both sides. The United Nations says 900,000 Afghans have been “internally displaced” by civil war, drought and hunger – and that the country has spawned the world’s worst refugee crisis.