The Last Warlord: The Life and Legend of Dostum, the Afghan Warrior Who Led US Special Forces to Topple the Taliban Re by Williams Brian Glyn

Author:Williams, Brian Glyn [Williams, Brian Glyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2013-08-31T21:00:00+00:00

The Taliban

AFGHANISTAN. 1994–97.

From the village of Sangesar, the Pashtun Taliban gathered new members and began to move from district to district like a rolling snowball, gathering size and momentum. It became obvious that this new band of austere religious students was unlike the previous mujahideen, who had become a byword for rape, licentiousness, and murder. And the Taliban had no compunction against taking on even the most powerful of the mujahideen. By the end of the year the Taliban were even attacking their fellow Pashtun fundamentalist leader, Hekmatyar.

With Pakistani help, the Taliban gained access to weapons depots in the south, gathered thousands of Pashtun fighters who were drawn to the austere new brotherhood, and moved on Kandahar, the spiritual capital of the Pashtun heartlands. They took the city in November 1994, and with it gained access to MiG-21 fighter-bombers, tanks, and artillery. The Taliban were now the strongest force in the Pashtun heartlands.

From there they conquered the remaining Pashtun provinces of the south, bringing peace—but at a cost. While the checkpoints and predatory mujahideen bandits were removed, the people were forced to follow a strict form of Islam the likes of which not even the Saudis enforced.

But the Taliban were not content with ruling the Pashtun belt of the south. By 1995 they had begun to move on the territory of the great Tajik mujahideen commander of the western town of Herat, Ismail Khan. In a series of extraordinary seesaw battles, the Taliban shocked the nation by conquering this warlord’s western domain. In response, Ismail Khan and his men fled across the Iranian border to the town of Meshed.

Once they conquered the cosmopolitan Tajik-dominated city of Herat, the Taliban repressed the Tajik locals and brought in Pashtun tribesmen from the south to rule over them. Then they turned on their fellow Pashtun, Hekmatyar, who was still continuing his on-again off-again siege of Kabul.

Around this time Massoud and Dostum offered to help Mullah Omar’s forces, and Dostum sent technicians to help the Taliban get their small fleet of MiG-21s air-worthy. Even the Shiite Hazaras proved to be willing to work with this strange new movement, which seemed intent on attacking their common enemy, Hekmatyar.

But the Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks soon found that they were playing with fire. They learned the real nature of the Taliban when the mysterious Mullah Omar signaled his intent to reconquer the Uzbek, Hazara, and Tajik lands of the north. In April 1996, all hopes for a modus vivendi with the new religious movement ended with one symbolic gesture. For the first time in recent history Mullah Omar had a holy relic, the khirqa (cloak) of the Prophet Muhammad given by the eighteenth-century Uzbek ruler of Bukhara to the Pashtun amir, removed from its sacred mosque in Kandahar. There he donned it before crowds of teary-eyed Kandaharis who chanted his name and had himself declared “commander of the faithful,” a title given only to the great caliphs who had ruled the medieval Arab Empire.

The symbolism for Dostum was clear.

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