Turf wars, ethnic rifts plague Afghan north and east

Even as American troops and allied Afghan fighters conduct their heaviest assault so far this year against a determined group of Taliban and Al Qaeda forces, surging ethnic tensions and jockeying warlords are undermining dreams of unity and peace elsewhere in Afghanistan.

The UN-brokered interim government of Hamid Karzai, in Kabul, is struggling to contain growing ethnic violence and turf battles in the north and east.

These are quickly becoming the biggest threats faced by Mr. Karzai, as he grapples to bring peace to a nation that has known nothing but war - and warlord rule - for more than two decades. To do the job, Karzai has made constant requests for a more robust international peacekeeping force - a plea that seems to be gaining ground as Karzai wrestles with the ethnic divisions central to the nation's problems.

The bitter homecoming of Abdurahim Gholam Rabbani, a pharmacist displaced from his home in northwestern Afghanistan, is an example of how divisive fears remain. Mr. Rabbani is a Pashtun, the ethnic group that formed the backbone of the Taliban. The arrival last November of ethnic Uzbek troops of General Abdul Rashid Dostum - a US-backed warlord with a brutal history in the Afghan north - forced 500 Pashtun families to flee to Maslach Camp in western Afghanistan.

The first time the bushy-bearded Rabbani went back to his village, a few weeks after fleeing, he found his pharmacy looted, his house destroyed, and Uzbek soldiers seeking revenge.

"'Are you Pashtun?' they asked me. 'Are you Taliban?' I said no, but they held me for one month," Rabbani recalled last week in the tent he now calls home, in this forlorn, muddy camp filled with other Afghans.

The second time Rabbani returned, a couple weeks ago, he was rounded up with a string of other family heads, accused again of backing the Taliban, and forced to buy his way to freedom.

"They told us they would kill us, if we didn't pay them money," Rabbani says. "These are local commanders, who do not think they will be in power for long. [Interim Prime Minister] Karzai has to look at these small cases, because they can create big problems."

Uzbek and Pashtun rivalries are among many simmering across the north. In a power play that analysts say is in anticipation of a June loya jirga, or grand assembly, during which delegates will divide the spoils of victory in a new Afghanistan government, Dostum's forces are locking horns with those of the ethnic Tajik-dominated troops of Mohamed Atta.

A recent peace deal reached between the two warlords, to disarm and share control of the town of Khulm, did not prevent Dostum units from rolling with tanks into Shulgara, 45 miles southwest of Mazar-e Sharif, on Feb. 20. Deepening the resentment, Mr. Atta's troops have been given a larger percentage of troops in a joint UN-backed police force in the city, which Mr. Dostum ruled for years in the 1990s.

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