Hazara Nation

With The Northern Alliance On The Move And A U.S. Assault Still Possible, Refugee Afghanis Say The Taliban Regime Is Vulnerable

Perched high in the arid mountains of central Afghanistan, the village of Kargamtu is one of the most isolated and destitute corners of the planet. Its 500 inhabitants dwell in mud huts without electricity; nobody owns a radio and few have ever heard of America.

But two weeks ago, frightening rumors began sweeping through Kargamtu about an imminent attack from a powerful, unnamed enemy. "People said, 'it isn't safe here, we must leave,'" says Roza Ma, 40, sitting on the roof of a half-finished mosque in a squalid neighborhood of Quetta, Pakistan. After village elders convened a meeting and urged Kargamtu's inhabitants to flee, Ma and her children stuffed their bags with clothing and bread and joined 40 other families on an eight-day journey by truck, bus and on foot to Pakistan. Along the way, she says, Taliban fighters frisked them at checkpoints, demanding bribes to allow them through. Ma, whose husband was killed by the Taliban in a massacre of Hazara tribespeople two years ago, feared meeting a similar fate. But, she says, "the Taliban didn't bother us."

The isolated regime may have more important matters to worry about. With a United States assault on Afghanistan still a possibility and the opposition Northern Alliance advancing toward Kabul from sanctuaries inside the Panjshir Valley, the Taliban government suddenly looks vulnerable. Refugees arriving in Pakistan describe forced conscriptions and the abandonment of hundreds of military checkpoints in western Afghanistan as Taliban fighters secure the country's borders or head toward the front line, north of Kabul. "Order appears to be breaking down," says one Western analyst in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, a refugee crisis is looming. By late last week, 1 million people were on the move inside Afghanistan, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Many were fleeing the cities for rural areas; thousands were making for the frontier with Pakistan and Iran. Both those countries have closed their borders, though border guards often look the other way in exchange for a small bribe, and Pakistan has promised to allow refugees in if Afghanistan disintegrates.

By some accounts, that disintegration is already underway. Word of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon spread within hours to many Afghanis over the Farsi- and Pashto-language services of the BBC and Voice of America. In the Taliban's strongholds, Kandahar and Kabul, "there was a big panic and a big exodus," says a Western relief worker in Quetta. By the end of the week, rumors of the crisis had filtered to even the most remote regions of the country. In the Tajik village of Mehmaniya in northern Afghanistan, Mohammed Abdullah, 58, heard neighbors murmuring about airplane attacks on tall buildings, thousands of deaths, suicide bombers killing opposition leader Ahmed Shah Massoud and probable war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. Abdullah sold his carpets, wood-timbered roof, two cows and four sheep, gathered his wife and five children and hopped trucks all the way to the border with Quetta, where he paid a Pakistani guard 100 rupees to let the family through. "Everyone believes that a big war is coming," says the bearded farmer, squatting in a mud-hut refugee camp in Quetta known as Jungle Bagh.

The Taliban is preparing, as well. Many young men have reportedly been press-ganged; most come from the Pashtun tribe, which dominates Afghanistan's south and west and fills the Taliban's ranks. But refugees fleeing from Kabul toward Northern Alliance territory say that Taliban militiamen are "rounding up young men from all ethnic groups and forcing them to fight," says one Western relief worker in Quetta. In one incident, Taliban militiamen stopped 40 Tajik families who tried to cross into Iran and ordered the men in the convoy to report for military duty. Taliban checkpoints along the 450-kilometer stretch of road between Kandahar and Herat were deserted last week, evidence, according to Western aid workers, that the government is dispatching all available troops to the front lines.