URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/09/27/MN229057.DTL
Dushanbe, Tajikistan -- Until President Bush signaled that the U.S. campaign against terrorism would start in Afghanistan, the West paid little attention to the cluster of fighters who have opposed the country's Taliban regime for the past five years -- the Northern Alliance.
Although the Bush administration says ousting the Taliban regime would not be the goal of attacks against terrorist havens in Afghanistan, alliance leaders say U.S.-led attacks would afford them an opportunity to do precisely that.
America's newfound friends are potentially very useful: Alliance fighters know Afghanistan's difficult terrain, speak local dialects and control the Soviet-built Bagram air base north of Kabul. But they have a troubling history as well.
Russian border guards, who still man the 682-mile frontier between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, reported last year that the alliance pays for rocket launchers, helicopters and ammunition with precious stones and, occasionally, opium and heroin.
The U.S. State Department and the United Nation's top anti-narcotics official have said that drug traffickers operate freely in areas controlled by the alliance.
A motley coalition of 15,000 to 30,000 fighters, the alliance considers the ruined northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif to be its capital even though the Taliban recaptured it in 1998. Since then, they have set up their headquarters in Faizabad, although most decisions are made by alliance leaders in Dushanbe, the capital of neighboring Tajikistan.
The group consists of communists, anti-communists and moderate Muslims who have only one goal in common: to oust the Taliban. Outside of that aim, the coalition's members are so diverse that experts fear a new civil war if they manage to topple the Taliban.
While the Taliban are mostly Pashtuns, who represent about 60 percent of Afghanistan's population, the Northern Alliance consists largely of ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras, who represent only about 15 percent of the populace.
Afghanistan plunged into civil war soon after the Soviets withdrew in 1989 and left their despised puppet regime, headed by Mohammad Najibullah, to fend off forces associated with several ethnic groups and Islamic factions. Najibullah was lynched by the Taliban in 1996.
In the past, the alliance has had trouble holding itself together in the face of devastating attacks by the estimated 30,000- to 50,000-man Taliban army. During the battle for Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998, for example, alliance forces commanded by the Uzbek Gen. Rashid Dostum simply abandoned the battlefield, and its leaders fled to Uzbekistan.
BARBARIC TACTICS Dostum is known for his cruelty and reportedly has killed political foes by tying them to two tanks headed in opposite directions. During the chaotic conflict that ensued after the Soviet withdrawal, Dostum's forces rampaged through Kabul, destroying much of the city with rocket fire, looting businesses and terrorizing women and children.
The alliance's political leader is Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was driven from power by the Taliban but is recognized as Afghanistan's president by the United States and other Western powers.
His deputy prime minister, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, is held responsible for the deaths of thousands of Shiite Muslims who reside mainly in northwestern Afghanistan, a minority he considers to be outside the pale of Islam.
Human rights groups have accused Sayyaf's troops of committing large-scale summary executions and rapes of Shiites during the 1992-96 civil war. Sayyaf also backed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf War and has advocated war to remove U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia, the site of Islam's holiest shrines.
The Northern Alliance has dominion over one of the poorest regions on Earth,
partly because the area has been ravaged by warfare and deprivation for the past 22 years. It controls 2 million people in about 10 percent of the country.
Most endure with typhoid and dysentery all around them, and their drinking water is contaminated with hepatitis bacteria. Many eat bitter soup they make with the sparse grass they find in the mountainous desert.
ANTIQUATED ARMS When the alliance wages war, it fights with rusty, outdated arms that the Soviet army left behind when it retreated after its ill-fated decade-long campaign, which killed a million Afghan civilians and left 15,000 Soviet soldiers dead and some 50,000 wounded.
During the war with the Soviet Union, future alliance leaders fought with U. S.-supplied weapons alongside Taliban forces and bin Laden.
But the Taliban and other hard-liners vowed to continue their resistance until an Islamic government had been installed in Kabul. In Mazar-e-Sharif, local militias soon joined the moderate mujahedeen, or holy warriors, to fight the southern Pushtun fundamentalists.
By 1996, the Taliban ruled 90 percent of the country, imposing strict Islamic rules on its 21 million people.
Ironically, post-Soviet Russia began arming its longtime enemies -- the very people who have become the Northern Alliance -- once the Kremlin decided to try to halt the Taliban's northward march to prevent the spread of Islamic fundamentalism into the former Soviet states of Central Asia. The alliance also has received support from Iran, which detests the Taliban's Sunni Muslim movement because it poses a potent threat to its own mainly Shiite Muslim theocracy.
In recent weeks, the rebels have stepped up their offensive against the Taliban. But their military leaders deny that the fighting has intensified because of the expectation that the United States will back them up.
AVENGING GEN. MASSOOD They say they are simply avenging the Sept. 9 assassination of the coalition's charismatic leader, Gen. Ahmed Shah Massood, an ethnic Tajik who was considered the alliance's most brilliant military tactician. The group blames Osama bin Laden, the primary suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 7,000 people in the United States, for Massood's death.
On Tuesday, President Bush said he will "ask for the cooperation of citizens within Afghanistan" to fight the Taliban and bin Laden. The Pentagon is well aware that only Afghan fighters are capable of staging and thwarting guerrilla attacks in the treacherous mountains of the Afghan Kush, taking cover and locating the enemy in highlands and gorges that would be totally unfamiliar to outsiders.
Saleh Muhammad Registani, the alliance's military attache to Moscow, suggested that the rebels could coordinate ground offensives while U.S. troops strike the Taliban from the air.
"We have been fighting against the Taliban for many years," said an alliance official in Dushanbe, who asked not to be named. "We are fighting because we want to see democracy in Afghanistan."
The history of many of the alliance's leaders, however, casts doubt on that claim.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- The Northern Alliance at a glance: The fight for Afghanistan -- What is it? The Northern Alliance consists of the military wing of Afghanistan's pre-Taliban government.
-- What is its influence? The alliance's role, at the moment, is relatively small; it controls less than 10 percent of the country.
-- How big are its forces? The alliance claims to have 30,000 troops, but experts say the real number may be half that. Its arsenal includes tanks, fighter jets and helicopter gunships from the Soviet era.
-- Who runs it? The alliance is headed by a 60ish scholar and poet named Burhanuddin Rabbani, who is still recognized as Afghanistan's president by the United States and other Western powers and holds Afghanistan's U.N. seat. The alliance suffered a huge blow earlier this month when its military leader, Gen.
Ahmed Shah Massood - a leader in the Afghan fight against Soviet occupation - was assassinated.
-- Who supports the alliance? The Taliban's enemies - Iran and Russia, among others.
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