Kandahar area was the centre of activity of one of the most notable
Durrani Pushtun commanders, namely Haji Abdul Latif; it was also
in this area that a number of ‘tribal’ fronts developed, notably
those associated with the Karzai family. Much of the fighting in
this area took the form of skirmishes, especially with the militia of
Esmatullah ‘Muslim’, formerly a soldier in the pre-communist
Afghan Army, who, after working with the resistance, defected to
the regime. This disordered situation in the early to mid-1980s car-
ried through to the collapse of the communist regime in 1992, with
disastrous long-term consequences.
Northern Afghanistan
In the north of Afghanistan, an odd duality came to characterise
the conflict. On the one hand, the main city in the north, Mazar-e
Sharif, was under regime control throughout the first phase of
the Soviet–Afghan War. This was of considerable significance for
the regime, since Mazar was the Afghan city closest to the Soviet
border. The terrain in the immediate vicinity of the city is almost
completely flat and treeless, and therefore does not lend itself to
easy exploitation by guerrilla fighters. On the other hand, a vigor-
ous young Jamiat-e Islami commander, a former schoolteacher
named Abdul Qader who employed the name of Zabiullah as a
nom de guerre, spearheaded active resistance in the surrounding
areas, notably Baghlan to the southeast, Kunduz to the east, and
Balkh to the west. He reportedly had 20,000 combatants under his
command (Urban, 1990: 143), and mounted some spectacular oper-
ations, notably the destruction of the control tower at Mazar’s
civilian airport in May 1983 (Chevalerias, 1985: 6). However, he
was hampered by tense relations with local combatants affiliated to
Muhammadi’s Harakat-e Inqilab-e Islami Afghanistan, drawn from
Pushtun populations in the Balkh and Kunduz areas. Zabiullah was
killed on 14 December 1984, aged only 30, when the vehicle in
which he was travelling struck a mine. It has never been estab-
lished whether his death was an accident or an assassination. The
vacuum following Zabiullah’s death took a long time to fill.
88 The Afghanistan Wars