After the war, infighting begins

But Ullah's fighters, many of the Hazara tribesmen that make up a small minority of the city's population, unleashed a fury of rockets and heavy machinegun fire as the governor's fighters fled for cover into municipal buildings and down small alleys.

In the next 24 hours, as many as 500 of Khan's fighters were disarmed and taken prisoner. Some 200 fighters loyal to the governor gathered on the eastern edge of town yesterday. All of them were downcast as they stockpiled heavy weaponry, and vowed to unleash the fury of the Zadran tribe today.

From the top of a petrol station on the edge of town, a dozen supporters of the governor mingled with backers of the council chief.

Several young boys gasped as a petrol station exploded and plumes of black smoke blanketed the city. The Bela Hisar, a medieval hill fortress, was being smashed by mortars shot by the governor's fighters even as two tanks out in front of the fort blasted back at the attackers.

On both sides of the fighting, elder tribesmen blasted Western powers for what many of them viewed as the start of a civil conflict that, for them, had no apparent end.

Beneath the petrol station, whose mud walls vibrated with massive explosion and rocket fire, an old man, who had just fled the city center, burst into a room. "There are dozens of corpses littering the streets, and I watched seven men bleed to death," says Haji Tur Gul. "We want this stopped. Why don't the Americans bomb these renegades who won't permit our president's governor to enter his own capital?"

Officials in Gardez, loyal to Ullah, claimed that 43 soldiers and civilians had been killed in the fighting. That figure could not be independently confirmed, but Khan claimed 15 of his fighters had been killed.

Early yesterday, US warplanes circled overhead, but by midday they had flown out of sight.

The battle lines, which divide along both factional and ethnic lines, could not have been more confusing for the US military, which is doggedly trying to root out lingering Al Qaeda cells in the region.

As in the nearby city of Khost, former Taliban officials have formed an unusual alliance with Northern Alliance factions, which are believed by most Afghans to be heavily financed by Iran.

Both the former Taliban factions and the Northern Alliance groups - which often field Shia Muslim fighters as opposed to the majority Sunni Muslim population in the country - are allied in their determination to prevent royalists like Khan from regaining power in Afghanistan.

The US military has been trying to work with both sides in the conflict in its efforts to eliminate terror, but the battle in Gardez now threatens to derail those efforts in eastern Afghanistan, which is believed to have hundreds, if not thousands, of renegade Al Qaeda fighters roaming in the mountains.

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