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Kabul men dig out their tapes, razors

Residents of Kabul gather around Noor Mohammed yesterday in Kabul, Afghanistan to listen to a music tape which had been banned by the Taliban. PHOTO: AP

Clean-shaven men rubbed their faces. An old man with a newly trimmed gray beard danced in the street holding a small tape recorder blaring music to his ear.

The Taliban -- who had banned music and ordered men to wear beards -- were gone.

"Look this feels so good," Ahmed Shah said as he rubbed his freshly shaven face. "I hated the beard. It was always itchy."

Many women were still not ready to abandon the all-enveloping burqa -- a traditional garment made mandatory by the Taliban. There were signs, however, that some, perhaps most, of the younger, educated women would eventually abandon the burqa in favor of Western styles.

In a rickety old blue bus, one women quickly flipped her burqa up over her head. Male residents who were gathering around a group of northern alliance soldiers laughed.

One young soldier, who looked to be about 18 years old, gestured to the women to take their burqas off. Most of the women who were holding small children simply watched the soldiers. Some of the women closed the curtains that are on all buses that carry women in Afghanistan. Others simply looked away.

The one who slipped her burqa off quickly put it back on. Nearby, six women, all in burqas, were going to a wedding.

"For now we will leave the burqa on. We don't know yet who are these people in the city," said Mariam Jan. Her husband, an ethnic Tajik, Mohammed Wazir, said "it is our tradition. We are not sure that it will stop."

Noor Mohammed, a small stout man, held a small tape player to his ear, waved his hands in the air dancing to the tune blaring from the radio.

"We are free," he shouted in his native Dari language.

Residents of the Afghan capital peered through the open doors of abandoned Taliban military bases and whispered to each other: "Are they gone?"

The bodies of two Arabs lay near the UN guest house, outside a military compound in a city that was taken over by opposition northern alliance with virtually no resistance.

Bundles of burned clothes and blankets were piled on top of the corpses, and a charred rocket launcher lay beside one of them. People gathered to look. The bodies of five Pakistanis lay where they were killed outside a small police station in the heart of Kabul.

Residents milled around to see.

Sporadic gunfire pierced the crisp early morning air as northern alliance soldiers celebrated their victory over the Islamic militia that ousted them from the capital in 1996. US bombing cleared the way for their rapid advances, which began with the fall of the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif on Friday.

Opposition fighters moved quickly through Kabul neighborhoods, conducting house-to-house searches and seizing abandoned bases. Rifle fire was heard at some outposts on the edges of the city.

"I think there were some Taliban who were asleep when everyone else left," said a smiling resident, Abdul Jan. "They have woken up and they are thinking `Oh my God, what can I do?'"

Fearing retaliation, a frightened employee of the Taliban's official Bakhtar News Agency hid his turban beneath the seat of his car. The Taliban required all men to wear turbans.

"Do you think they will hurt me?" the employee, Abdul Rehman, asked a reporter.

In some areas of Kabul, residents gathered on street corners to talk about what they had seen, and pointed out houses of former Taliban commanders. Opposition soldiers said they were collecting arms as they moved door-to-door.

Groups of five to 10 men huddled in the streets, wrapped in woolen shawls. Northern alliance fighters sped through the streets in vehicles camouflaged with mud that had been left behind by Taliban troops.

In northern Khair Khana district, inhabited largely by ethnic Tajiks who fled the earlier fighting north of the city, some people shouted: "Congratulations. Oh my God, they are here." Some men hugged each other.

"We leave everything to God. We don't know what will happen. We pray only for peace," said Sheer Agha, an elderly man wrapped in a striped shawl, his gray beard reaching almost to his chest.

"We are happy. Now I have to go to the barber to shave my beard," said Zabiullah, an ethnic Tajik. "Today is a happy day."

Two men on a bicycle looked at each other. "Do you think I can shave now?" one asked. The Taliban required men to grow long beards and failure to do so invited harsh punishment.

Houses used by Taliban leaders in the once posh neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan were abandoned. The large steel doors of home of former Health Minister Mullah Abbas Akhund were wide open.

Homes were also abandoned on Street 15 of Wazir Akbar Khan, famous in this area as "the street of guests," a reference to the Arab, Chechen and Uzbek volunteers who were allied with the Taliban.

Many were affiliated with Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect in the terrorist attacks in the US in September.

In the money market in the old city, businessmen said departing Taliban soldiers emptied the stores of goods and money. One money changer, who gave his name as Wali, said Taliban soldiers on tanks stopped in front of the shops, demanded the money and then rumbled out of the city.
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