as Taliban were hunted down by enraged locals. Hundreds were
killed. By nightfall, the alliance between Malik and the Taliban was
dead, even though Malik had done his best during the day to stop
the fighting. A subsequent UN investigation pointed out that an
alarming amount of ethnically motivated violence was triggered by
these events: ‘It appears that everybody was butchering everybody
up there’, a UN official reportedly said (Associated Press, 13
December 1997). A large number of Taliban prisoners in Malik’s
hands were killed, possibly in revenge for Taliban killing of
Jumbeshprisoners after a flare-up of fighting in September. The
Taliban did eventually take the city. On 12 September 1997,
Dostam returned from Turkey and resumed control, displacing the
treacherous Malik with relative ease. He even managed to resist a
renewed Taliban attempt to take the city. But his aura of compe-
tence had been very seriously compromised, and this worked to his
disadvantage in August 1998, when the Taliban struck again. This
time, the Taliban took no chances, and Dostam was forced to flee
for a second time. An orgy of slaughter then ensued.
The Taliban approach to the Hazarajat combined a blockade to
prevent the entry of foodstuffs (Rashid, 1997a), and military
assaults directed at breaking the Hazaras’ military capabilities. The
Hazaras remained a significant force, and held Bamiyan longer
than Dostam held Mazar. Bamiyan was still under Hezb-e Wahdat
control on 21 August 1997 when Abdul Rahim Ghafoorzai, a tal-
ented Pushtun diplomat who had represented the Islamic State at
the United Nations and whom the anti-Taliban forces had agreed
should become their Prime Minister, was killed there in a plane
crash. On 13 September 1998, the Taliban took Bamiyan; Wahdat
regained it on 21 April 1999, but the Taliban took it back on 9
May (Rashid, 2000: 67–79), killing a significant number of civil-
ians in the process (Amnesty International, 1999a). Thereafter, the
Taliban concentrated on hunting down groups of opponents in
more remote parts of the Hazarajat, often using barbaric tactics to
do so. Bamiyan was briefly retaken by anti-Taliban forces on 13
February 2001, but changed hands yet again a few days later –
with dire consequences for Afghanistan’s cultural heritage.
230 The Afghanistan Wars