| More than 60 Afghan fighters killed or wounded in Afghanistan CNN
10/09/2003
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MAZAR-E SHARIF, Afghanistan (Reuters) -- More than 60 Afghan fighters have been killed or wounded in one of the worst outbreaks of fighting between pro-government factions since the Taliban fell almost two years ago, a faction official said. The ethnic Uzbek Junbish faction of General Abdul Rashid Dostum overran several districts west of the northern capital of Mazar-e Sharif in fighting involving tanks, artillery and mortars that began on Wednesday and continued overnight, an official of the rival, mainly ethnic Tajik, Jamiat faction said. Gen. Abdul Saboor told Reuters at least 60 from Jamiat had been killed or wounded, but he gave no breakdown. Junbish official Said Nurullah said on Wednesday three of its soldiers had been killed and four hurt in a Jamiat ambush in the Fayzabad area. "Around Mazar-e Sharif the situation is not good," Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali told reporters in Kabul. He said he would lead a delegation to Mazar on Thursday, aiming to ease tension and implement military and administrative reforms. Fighters from the two factions have clashed repeatedly since the Taliban's overthrow by U.S.-led forces in late 2001. Past U.N.-brokered disarmament drives have failed. The violence has raised doubts about the ability of President Hamid Karzai's government to bring stability to the entire country. The latest fighting erupted as the Defense Ministry, United Nations and Japan signed an agreement in Kabul on Wednesday on an ambitious plan to demobilize 100,000 factional fighters. A spokesman for the United Nations, which runs aid programs from Mazar-e Sharif, said the fighting was some of the worst seen in north and was of "great concern." Jalali said the reforms he would be pushing for in the north would involve the collection of heavy weapons and a regrouping of forces. Commanders cooperating
Jalali said he had spoken to the leaders of the two factions, Ustad Atta Mohammad and Dostum, both of whom are government officials, and they had pledged to try to defuse the situation, which they blamed on incidents at a "lower level." "They are cooperating and talking to the government," Jalali said. Both men had pledged to cooperate with the crucial U.N.-supervised disarmament process due to start in the north later this month and in the Mazar area in November, he said. The militias are seen as the main threat to Karzai's efforts to extend his influence into unruly provinces and the violence underscores the problem he faces as he contends with stepped up Taliban guerrilla attacks in the south. The fighting also shows the potential risks to foreign peacekeepers once NATO expands its operations outside Kabul. With tension high in Mazar, Mohammad Iftikhari, the security commander in the city, which is controlled by both Junbish and Jamiat, declared a night-time curfew on Wednesday. U.N. spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said he did not have casualty figures, but the fighting had been intense and there appeared to have been "a high number." "There has been the use of tanks, which we haven't seen for a long time," he said. The clashes had forced a suspension of U.N. road missions west of Mazar. The city was calm except for tank movements in the west. Silva said there was a limit to what the international community, including a British civilian-military Provincial Military Reconstruction Team in Mazar, could do. "These two parties have two leaders who are responsible for their forces," he said. "They are responsible for the fighting, as they should be for stopping the fighting."
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