Afghanistan Revolts

Ousted President Najibullah spends what may well be the last days of his life in a small room with a television and a radio. There are only a few chairs, enough for his trusted brother and the two generals who remain by his side. Every hour he sits, he waits to learn whether he will live or die. Holed up in a loosely guarded U.N.

Targets of an alleged Afghan assassination conspiracy included foreigners, the country's exiled king and interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, authorities said Thursday, accusing those arrested of "undermining, threatening, sabotaging and harming this government." Interior Minister Younis Qanooni said that about 300 opponents of Karzai's government had been arrested or detained in recent days and that 160 remained in custody.

A hijacked Afghan airliner with more than 160 people on board landed at Stansted Airport on the northeastern outskirts of London early this morning after hopscotching through Central Asia and Russia. The armed, unidentified hijackers, demanding the release of an Afghan guerrilla leader, seized the Ariana Airlines Boeing 727 on Sunday morning after it took off from Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

Sun-bronzed Najmuddin, 23, hefted his trusty Kalashnikov into the crook of his arm and smiled grimly beneath his pancake woolen hat. "We are going to Gardez," he said. "I think it will be the last fighting."

As Afghan government troops fled their bunkers and posts under cover of darkness, the Taliban militia early today overran the capital, Kabul, hanged the former pro-Soviet leader, Najibullah, and proclaimed the creation of a strict Islamic state. After two days of heavy fighting that left hundreds dead around the war-devastated city, the rebels met little resistance as they rolled into Kabul about 1 a.m. in tanks and on foot from several directions, reports said.

The tent is swept clean and the bedding neatly folded against the wall. Kalander Mahmadnazar sits cross-legged while his wife and daughters kneel behind a low table, covering their faces from the strangers at the door. "It's hard to live here in the winter," says Mahmadnazar, a refugee from Tajikistan. "But the Communists burned our houses. We escaped because they tried to kill us. They accused us of being Muslim extremists."

Old-timers remember this as a lively, playfully irreverent city. Once, street urchins had a standard greeting for Westerners strolling down the market lanes: "Hey, Mr. Katchalu, " they would shout. That means "Mr. Potato" in the local Dari language. The nickname dates back two centuries to the Europeans who introduced potatoes to this remote Central Asian land ringed with mountains. But it is no longer heard on the streets of Kabul.

Their most frequent companions are hunger and cold, and like Oliver Twist, they daydream of being able to eat their fill. Home--if you can call it that--is a drafty building without electricity, heat or running water on a dusty plain littered with abandoned Soviet military equipment. For as long as they can remember, the 850 residents of northwestern Kabul's Daurul Itom orphanage, ages 6 months to 21 years, have known nothing but war.

Refugees fleeing an Afghan city recently conquered by the Taliban say that troops with the ultra-orthodox religious army slaughtered thousands of civilians when they took the town last month. The refugees, who are arriving here each day on foot from the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, say Taliban fighters focused exclusively on an ethnic minority known as the Hazaras, picked out by their distinctive Mongolian features.

As talk of a potential settlement in the 8-year-old war in Afghanistan increases here, the loosely affiliated Afghan rebels, known collectively as the moujahedeen, or holy warriors, are engaged in a contest for postwar primacy that has foreign journalists and aid workers caught in the crossfire. In September, one of the largest rebel groups in Afghanistan hijacked a French medical relief mission headed for Badakhshan province.

About 200 fighters for one of northern Afghanistan's key warlords laid down their weapons Monday in a ceremony their leader said may be the first step toward broader disarmament. "We have turned a new page," Ata Mohammed told his soldiers marshaled at the 120-year-old Baghjahanuma fort, about 50 miles southeast of the main northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. "Now is not the time for fighting, now is the time to lay down our guns." U.N.

Mediators shuttled between Uzbek and Tajik commanders Monday trying to hammer out a truce after a factional clash killed eight people and wounded 30 in this northern Afghan town. The fighting poked a hole in the paper-thin sense of peace here and raised tensions between the region's most powerful warlords, the same ones who had fought together as members of the Northern Alliance.

Afghan and U.N. mediators, joined by U.S. officials, extracted a conditional cease-fire agreement Sunday from two rival tribal warlords in this eastern Afghan town that was rocked by two days of fighting last week. With factional fighting threatening the national government's efforts to assert control throughout the country, the delegation hopes to avert more tribal clashes in Gardez, a town of about 40,000 that is the capital of Paktia, a strategic border province. U.S.

His pensive, bearded visage adorns virtually every wall and windshield in this capital, where the wars he waged against Soviet and Taliban oppressors seem finally to have ended in victory for his people as well as a martyr's death for himself. Ahmed Shah Masoud, the ethnic Tajik warrior who kept Afghan hopes for freedom from foreign domination alive through bloody battles for two decades, has been reborn as a national icon in the six weeks since his Northern Alliance cohorts took power in Kabul.

Vasudin, 25, a Taliban fighter, was the proud possessor of his dream car, a Datsun Hilux pickup truck, for not much more than one glorious hour. He took possession of the truck as a trophy of war. Asked when, he looked at his gold watch. "About an hour ago," he grinned Saturday.

An advance by Northern Alliance forces surrounding the last Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan came to a halt Friday after new claims that Afghans fighting for the Taliban had agreed to surrender. Although the two sides have been discussing a surrender in Kunduz for days, there were contradictory reports on whether several thousand foreign fighters, mainly from Pakistan and Arab countries, also would give up.

Ten days before Soviet troops are scheduled to begin withdrawing from his country, President Najibullah of Afghanistan met Wednesday with Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at the start of a visit intended to boost the Kabul regime's morale. Najibullah and Gandhi held talks for more than two hours after an ornate welcoming ceremony, the first of its kind for the Afghan leader because India is one of the few countries outside the Soviet Bloc to recognize his government.

Two Americans filming a documentary on the Afghanistan war died in an attack on their rebel escorts near the Afghan capital of Kabul, the U.S. Embassy and guerrilla spokesmen said Tuesday. The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad confirmed that independent film maker Lee Shapiro, 37, of New York, and camera soundman Jim Lindelof, 30, of Los Angeles, were killed Oct. 11. The embassy said their bodies are still in Afghanistan but gave no other details.

Northern Alliance forces on Monday threatened to attack thousands of surrounded Taliban fighters in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz if they don't surrender, and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned that freeing the hard-line fighters would endanger America. Rumsfeld said he would do everything he could to prevent a negotiated deal in the stalemate because a large share of the Taliban force is made up of zealous non-Afghan fighters from the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

They'd spent days haunting Peshawar's musty government offices, forgotten chambers stacked to the ceiling with sodden, twine-bound piles of paper. They'd stared at the makeshift filing system and waited in endless lines. More than once, they'd agreed frostily to come back tomorrow. But on Saturday afternoon, the car trunks slammed and the old buses shuddered to a start and the journey to Afghanistan from the Pakistani city began at last.