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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (34902)	7/24/2002 11:38:02 AM
From: Condor	Respond to of 281500

Warlords Battle in Afghanistan 07/24/2002 09:47:36 EST KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - An Afghan vice president traveled to the western city of Herat to investigate reports of heavy fighting between ethnic Tajik and Pashtun gunmen, the government news agency said Tuesday. It appeared to be the latest flare-up in warlord rivalries that threaten to embroil Afghanistan anew. Tajik fighters under Herat province's governor, Ismail Khan, clashed for two days with gunmen of a rival Pashtun commander, Ammanullah Khan, said another news service, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press. It gave no casualty figures, although other reports spoke of up to a dozen dead and many more wounded. Afghan Islamic Press said a cease-fire was agreed to late Monday night through the mediation of central government representatives. Spokesmen for the Interior and Defense ministries in Kabul, however, said they could not confirm the reported clashes. Nayiamatullah Shahrani, one of four Afghan vice presidents, traveled to the area to investigate the dispute, said Abdullah, an editor of the government's Bakhtar News Agency. Shahrani, as an Uzbek, belongs to neither of the contending ethnic groups. Ismail Khan has long been a power in Herat. Although in exile during the Taliban's five-year rule of Afghanistan, he returned to take charge of the southwestern province after the U.S.-led ouster of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban last December. Since then, minority Pashtuns in the area have complained bitterly of looting and oppression by Ismail Khan's armed followers. As a weak new central government seeks to impose law and order and to control potential tax revenues in Afghanistan, warlord rivalries have flared into violence in northern, eastern and western areas of the country among armed factions reluctant to surrender their own share of power and local wealth. One source of friction is the feeling among many Pashtuns, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, that they are underrepresented in top positions in a central government dominated by minority Tajiks.