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Once in power in Kabul, the Taliban turned their attention to the northern provinces which still eluded them. It was essential that the Taliban make a footprint in the North to prevent the rebel alliance led by Massoud from coordinating activities from the region, and also ensure economic security—the North was a hub of industrial and agricultural activities.

The Taliban first turned their attention to the crown jewel—Mazar-i-Sharif in the Balkh province, then under the control of Dostum and the Uzbek forces. Mazar was an economic hub, historically linked to Alexander the Great, an area where Zoroaster preached, and was the hub of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Islam. As Barfield notes in his book, Mazar was a microcosm of Afghanistan with all its quirks. The shrine of Hazrat Ali, the first Imam of the Shia sect of Islam, is situated in the city and venerated by the Sunni Muslims. “The most popular holiday to visit the shrine is the Nowruz, a Persian sun-worshipping equinox holiday. No amount of mullah or Taliban intervention could stop what they called an ‘un-Islamic’ practice,” he wrote.

As the Taliban edged towards Mazar, Dostum’s second-in-command Malik defected from the Uzbek warlord and joined hands with the Islamist militia. Uzbek fled to Turkey, and the Taliban had a rather easy entrance into Mazar. There, disagreements erupted between the Taliban and Malik—as the story goes, Malik felt betrayed that the Taliban did not keep their promise of allowing him autonomy in the North—and the Hazaras rebelled simultaneously. In May 1997, Hazaras ambushed and rounded up thousands of Taliban troops, and killed over 500—including some top generals in the Army. Malik himself is believed to have killed over a thousand Taliban prisoners, and dumped their bodies in unmarked graves across the region. It was a bloodbath, Rashid wrote in Taliban, with the Hazaras remembering fully well their thirst for revenge over the death of their leader Mazari in Kabul. The Taliban were pushed back from the northern provinces, which spurred Massoud—who had been regrouping to form an alliance with Hazaras and the Uzbeks—to re-enter the battle fray.

Taliban would hit back, in a brutal fashion. In August 1988, Taliban conducted a dance of destruction in Mazar, brutally killing anything and everything, attacking Hazaras, Tajiks and Uzbeks in a genocidal frenzy. The Taliban threw all Islamic limitations to the air and forbade the burial of the thousands of corpses that had piled up in the city. Almost 10,000 were reported killed in the incident. The Taliban fighters also entered the Iranian embassy in Mazar, executing eight Iranian diplomats and journalists with the Iranian state news agency.

The Taliban also put out a complete blockade on the Bamiyan province—a stronghold of Hazaras—starving them out mercilessly.

But the ground between the Taliban’s feet was slowly being cut away. The Northern Alliance, headed by Massoud, was gaining widespread international support. Russia, Iran and India were all propping up the rebel alliances. The Northern Alliance always maintained control of regions like Panjshir, Parwan and Badakhshan, while territories like Baghlan and Kunduz were among the fiercely contested and kept changing hands. The Northern Alliance had some impressive names in its multi-ethnic fold—Haq and Haji Qadir led the Pashtuns, Massoud led the Tajiks and the Panjshiris, Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq led the Hazaras, and Dostum led the Uzbeks.

The war had become multi-pronged: It was north against south and Pashtuns against non-Pashtuns.

Iran, who patronised the Hazara Hizb-e-Wahadat and other Persian-speaking groups like the Tajiks, was already furious at the Taliban actions in Bamiyan. The embassy bloodbath was the last straw. An enraged Tehran was building up troops along its Afghanistan border, threatening Pakistan of war in the region. Russia was growingly increasingly concerned about destabilisation in its immediate neighbourhoods, worried about the growing Islamist secessionist movements in the Central Asian nations. The US, who had remained aloof from Afghanistan for decades stating there was ‘no good option’, finally woke up to the trans-national jihadi threat it had helped spawn with its funding of the mujahideen. In August 1998, Osama Bin Laden’s sympathisers had blown up US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 225. Then US president Bill Clinton had, in response, started bombing Laden’s camps in Afghanistan from the air.

Pakistan, the only supporter of Taliban at the time, was slowly becoming a pariah in the global stage.

Both the US and Saudi Arabia—the latter one of the biggest funders of the mujahideen and later the Taliban—pressurised Omar to hand over Laden. Saudi intelligence chief Prince Faisal bin Turki even had a face-to-face with Omar to push him on the subject. In a 2004 interview to Der Spiegel, Turki revealed that he met a completely transformed Omar who extremely nervous, perspiring, and hurling insults at the Saudi Arabian royal family like he “has been taking drugs”. Post the incident, Saudi completely pulled funding.

The Northern Alliance put up stiff resistance against the Taliban across the country, as Massoud grew in stature both nationally and internationally as one of the finest guerrilla commanders of his era. On September 9, 2001, Massoud was assassinated in suicide bombing by two al Qaeda operatives masquerading as journalists. Two days, 9/11 happened in the US and the twin towers collapsed.

Less than a month later, the US and the NATO started a scorched earth campaign against the Taliban in retaliation to 9/11, bombing it mercilessly and pushing it back from Kabul, deeper into the South. By December, Taliban had given up Kandahar, with the top leadership crossing borders into Pakistan. Where it had all begun, it had all ended. Or at least, that was how it seemed then.

Read Part 2 of the series here

Read Part 1 of the series here