Afghans celebrate Taliban fleeing capital

KABUL, Afghanistan -- It was a day when the grisly and the joyous came together in the Afghan capital. Men exultantly shaved off their beards for the first time in years. They played music in public. A man impishly but unsuccessfully encouraged women on a bus to uncover their faces. \nIn a forested park of Kabul, a different story unfolded Tuesday. There, five men who had come to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban lay dead, their bodies riddled with bullets from a final gun battle. \nThe five, identified as Pakistanis, were among the foreign Muslim fighters, Arabs, Chechens and others, who are now targets for reprisal by Afghans who associate them with five years of oppressive Taliban rule. \nThere was unease too, that with the sudden, sweeping advances of the northern alliance, Afghanistan might slide back into the factional fighting that characterized the alliance's 1992-1996 rule over the country. \n"Today we are celebrating, but we worry that tomorrow they will start fighting again. We pray that won't happen," said Ahmed Rashef, who sat in a barber's chair for the first time in five years. \n"I hated this beard," he said. Being shaved "is like being free." \nThe barber, Zul Gai, smiled broadly. \n"This has been my best business day in many long years," he said. But he wasn't shaving off his bushy black beard just yet. \n"It's still too early," Gai said. "We will wait and see." \nThe Red Cross said the bodies of five Pakistanis and six Arab nationals were collected from different parts of the city. \nThe Pakistanis had climbed into trees and were firing randomly when northern alliance troops killed them in a hail of bullets, and went on firing into their corpses, witnesses said. \nThen the northern alliance men stuffed Afghani bank notes up the nose of one and into the gaping head wound of another, an Afghan way of implying an enemy is corrupt. Their bodies were taken away by the Red Cross.\nFour Arabs died when their pickup truck was blasted by a U.S.-made rocket. Their charred bodies were dragged from their vehicle by people who kicked and poked at them. \nTwo other Arabs were killed outside a military base near the United Nations guesthouse. Their bodies were covered with blankets and old clothes and thrown into the street. \nThrough Soviet occupation in the 1980s, the civil wars of the 1990s, the age of the Taliban and the U.S. bombings of the past month, Kabul has endured great suffering. The foreign fighters, many of them allied with Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, are particularly acute symbols of the Taliban and its militant brand of Islam. \nThat doctrine banned music, forced men to grow their beards to a prescribed length, empowered street enforcers to whip them into mosques to pray. Women were barred from work or school, and had to cover themselves from head to toe in tent-like robes called burqas. \nThe Taliban's alleged alliance with terrorism made Afghanistan an international pariah, and led to the U.S. bombing to force the surrender of bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States that killed thousands. \nSo the end of Taliban rule was described by many in Kabul as tantamount to being freed from prison, and Tuesday became a day of small but telling declarations of independence. \nSeveral people took their audiocassette recorders out of hiding and openly played music for the first time in five years. \nAbdul Rehman unwrapped his cassette recorder and let the voice of Ahmed Zaher, his favorite singer, blare in the street. \n"I used to play this at home, but very quietly, and then I would check to see if anyone was outside," he said. \nAn old man, his gray beard trimmed shorter than previously allowed, danced in the street holding a tape recorder that played music. Others renewed acquaintance with their freshly shaved faces. \n"Look, this feels so good!" said Ahmed Shah, rubbing his face. "I hated the beard. It was always itchy." \nThe women seemed cautious about dumping the Taliban rules. The burqa was commonplace attire in deeply conservative Afghanistan long before the Taliban made it mandatory, and on Tuesday most women kept theirs on despite the disappearance of the Taliban enforcers. \nIn a rickety old bus, a woman flipped her burqa up over her head. Male onlookers laughed. She quickly flipped it back. \nOne young northern alliance soldier gestured to the other women on the bus to take their burqas off, but got no response. Some looked away, or closed the window curtains. \n"For now we will leave the burqa on. We don't know yet who are these people in the city," said Mariam Jan, one of six women traveling to a wedding. Her husband, Mohammed Wazir, said: "It is our tradition. We are not sure that it will stop." \nHouses occupied by Taliban leaders in the once posh neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan were abandoned. The large steel doors of the home of former Health Minister Mullah Abbas Akhund were wide open. \nHomes were also abandoned on the so-called "street of guests," a reference to the Taliban's foreign volunteers. \nIn 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 Dr. Wali, said Taliban soldiers on tanks stopped in front of the shops, demanded the money and then drove out of the city.