Sitting cross-legged over a breakfast of flat bread and kebab in the upper room of a tea shop, Ghulam Rabbani watches his troops in the bazaar below. Amid a throng of locals in the northeastern Afghan town of Baharak, scores of his Northern Alliance soldiers are making last-minute buys before boarding large Russian-built flatbed trucks for the three-day journey through the heart of the Hindu Kush mountains to the plains north of Kabul. "We've served in the north for the past four months," says Rabbani. "But we're being moved south for duty."
Rabbani's 300-man assault battalion is just one of the...
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