Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan

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Mazar-e Sharif owes its existence to a dream. At the beginning of the 12th century a local mullah had a dream in which the Ali bin Talib, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law and one of the four rightly guided Caliphs appeared to reveal that he had been secretly buried near the city of Balkh. After investigation, the Seljuk sultan Sanjar ordered a shrine to be built on the spot, where it stood until its destruction by Genghis Khan. Although later rebuilt, Mazar stood in the shadow of its neighbour Balkh, until that city was abandoned in 1866 for health reasons. Mazar became the capital of Afghan Turkestan and has prospered since.

During the war against the Soviets, Mazar was a base for the Jamiat-e Islami of Massoud and Rabbani, but largely sat out the fighting itself. As a garrison for the communist Afghan army, the city was under the commander of the Uzbek general Abdul Rashid Dostum, who mutinied against the Najibullah regime in 1992 and established the autonomous administration of North Afghanistan with the aid of Massoud.

Under Dostum's Uzbek Jumbesh-e Melli, Mazar was an oasis of peace in during the civil war, and as the rest of the country disintegrated he strengthened political ties with the newly independent Central Asian states and Turkey, printed his own currency and established his own airline. This peace was shattered in May 1997, when he was betrayed by one of his generals, Abdul Malik, and fled Mazar as the Taliban seized control. It was this capture of Mazar that prompted Pakistan's recognition of the Taliban regime. The Taliban's hold only lasted a few days before a Shia-led revolt drove them out, although only until August 1998, when the Taliban returned and captured the city for good, exacting grave revenge on the population through terror and massacre.

Following 9/11, Mazar was the first Afghan city to fall the US-supported Northern Alliance. The Taliban's retreat from Mazar quickly turned in to rout from the rest of the north and west of Afghanistan. Mazar is now once again in the hands of Dostum, holding an uneasy peace with the Jamiat forces of the Tajik Atta Mohammed. Both have signed up to the Bonn Agreement and hold at least nominal allegiance to Hamid Karzai. Small scale clashes between militias belonging to the two commanders persisted throughout 2002, and were the focus of intensive UN peace-brokering and small arms disarmament programme. After some pressure, an office of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission opened an office in Mazar in April 2003. There have been repeated reports of persecution of the Pashtun minority, who have been seen as sympathetic to the Taliban. More on www.kabulcaravan.com

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