HUSSEIN KOT, Afghanistan - Pushed back to within 15 miles of the Afghan capital's heart, the Taliban yesterday showered their foes with artillery shells, rockets and tank rounds in a stubborn bid to bar the route to Kabul, the Islamic militia's greatest prize.
On this barren, dun-colored moonscape north of Kabul, Taliban gunners fired throughout the morning on troops loyal to Ahmed Shah Masoud, the ousted Afghan government's defense chief, and into hamlets of mud-brick homes where the inhabitants have revolted against the Talibs' severe version of Sharia, or Islamic law.
"The people of these villages are with them," admitted Mullah Faisal Mohammed, 24, one of the Taliban's junior commanders, as he swept his hand across the horizon, where exploding shells sent up plumes of smoke and dust.
"But we are not afraid of them, since new fighters from other provinces are coming to join us."
As the guns thundered, hundreds of residents of Hussein Kot and other rural villages fled south to Kabul on foot or in lurching, overloaded trucks.
On a parallel road to the east, Taliban artillery men, tank gunners and crews of multiple-barrel mounted rocket batteries poured a hail of steel and shrapnel onto Masoud's positions around the strategic Bagram air base, which had fallen to the former government's forces Saturday.
Despite a string of recent battlefield setbacks, Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Taliban's information minister, declared at a news conference in Kabul yesterday that the army of Muslim purists will never quit the capital.
The failure of the Taliban's main foreign backer, Pakistan, to broker an end to the latest round of fighting presages continuing armed strife in a country where more than 1 million people have already perished in 17 years of warfare.
Masoud, who may have fewer than 5,000 men, now appears to be too weak to storm the capital, while the Taliban's northward momentum has been broken and reversed.
The strategy of the cagey Masoud, probably the most famous of the moujahedeen leaders to have fought the 1979-89 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, appears to be to bleed the Taliban by drawing as many of their fighters into combat as possible while encircling Kabul and cutting some of its main road links.
As well as blocking the main highway leading north from Kabul to the Amu Darya river and the former Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, Masoud's forces were also reported to have taken some of the high ground east of the capital yesterday. This would let them bombard the main land artery linking Kabul and Pakistan via the Khyber Pass.
The ultimate intentions of the third player in Afghan's bloody power politics, the Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, are the X factor in the equation that will determine Afghanistan's future.
Dostum, a former general in the Communist regime ousted in 1992, signed a defense alliance this month with Masoud and has apparently supplied him with ammunition, fuel and artillery cover in the latter's campaign against the Taliban.
But Dostum's well-equipped militia, believed to number up to 30,000 men, appears to have played no major part to date in the battles against the Taliban; Dostum is being ardently wooed by the Islamic fundamentalists as a potential ally.
The Taliban, a die-hard Muslim militia that arose two years ago in mosque schools along the Afghan-Pakistani border, rolled into Kabul on Sept. 27, putting forces loyal to Masoud and President Burhanuddin Rabbani to flight.
Within days, the Talibs, mainly members of Afghanistan's dominant Pushtun ethnic group, were masters of three-quarters of the country.
It was their high-water mark. In fighting that followed as they drove north of Kabul toward the snow-dusted Hindu Kush mountains, the Taliban may have lost 1,500 of their most experienced fighters and commanders.
Masoud attacked his enemies on the road to the Salang Tunnel, 60 miles north of Kabul, and split them into small pockets. Informed sources in Kabul said hundreds of Talibs were killed, wounded and captured; at least 17 armored vehicles were abandoned.
In the Shomali valley north of Kabul, villagers revolted against the Talibs' strict, puritanical style of Islamic law, which insists on beards for men, tent-like burkas for women and no jobs or education for females. Talibs retaliated by burning down homes and killing some of the mutineers.
AP PHOTO
Two Taliban fighters clean the barrels of their multiple rocket launcher about 15 kilometers north of Kabul yesterday.