Kabul

KABUL, Afghanistan -- War broke out in Kabul yesterday, hours after victorious Muslim guerrillas occupied the city. Throughout the day, two rival rebel groups filled the virtually empty streets with the thunder of tanks, rockets and rifle fire, replacing the celebratory tattoo of flares and tracers that had been launched into the night sky on Saturday.Kabul remained without any apparent leadership yesterday, despite the announcement that a security council had been formed for the city. The day after rebels took the capital, residents remained barricaded in their homes, and shops were shuttered.

SOUTH OF DURANI, Afghanistan - Afghanistan opened a new highway between Kandahar and Kabul yesterday, one of the first significant signs of progress in the enormous task of rebuilding the country. On smooth new asphalt, the 300-mile trip between the cities takes five hours. It took as much as 30 hours on the old road, which had been ground nearly to dust by Soviet military vehicles and tanks during the 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan war. But the new road is still dangerous because of the threat from bandits and the resurgent Taliban militia.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The U.S. military is investigating the possibility that soldiers fired into a crowd of Afghans at the scene of a fatal traffic accident that set off a day of rioting this week. "There are indications, as part of our initial investigation, that coalition soldiers did in fact use their weapons in self-defense," Col. Tom Collins, a spokesman for U.S. forces here, said yesterday. In a statement released Monday, Collins had said there were "indications that at least one coalition military vehicle fired warning shots over the crowd."

KABUL, Afghanistan - The car bomb that killed more than 40 people outside the Indian Embassy here yesterday stoked regional tensions and threatened to erode already diminishing confidence in the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Afghanistan's Interior Ministry indirectly blamed Pakistan for the suicide attack, the deadliest in Kabul since the fall of the Taliban movement in 2001. Nearly 150 people were injured in the bombing, an audacious strike in what previously had been considered a well-secured area of the Afghan capital.

KABUL, Afghanistan - The year 1381 dawned here yesterday, and for many Kabul residents, it came none too soon. Tens of thousands of people marched in parades, danced and threw picnics in a boisterous celebration of the Islamic calendar's new year, called Nowruz. The holiday had been outlawed by the sternly fundamentalist Taliban regime. But this was a new year, and, in every way, a new season. Outside the municipal stadium - where not long ago the Taliban publicly executed criminals - pushcart vendors hawked coconuts, caramel-dipped popcorn and mugs of cherry juice.

KABUL, Afghanistan - - The thunderous explosion Saturday that targeted Western military headquarters in the heart of Kabul carried an ominous message aimed at ordinary Afghans just five days before national elections: Vote at your peril. The audacious suicide car bombing, which killed at least seven people and injured nearly 100, appeared designed to signal that insurgents can strike at will even in the capital's most tightly guarded districts. "The intent here is clear," said Aziz Rafiee, executive director of the Afghan Civil Society Forum.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Nural Hak can't forget the February day a year ago when the pickup trucks with the tinted windows braked in the dust outside the Kabul Museum and young men piled out carrying AK-47s. The building had been looted eight years earlier. Its walls were scorched by fire, pierced by bullets and rockets. All that was left were ancient sculptures, too heavy to haul away. Why had they come? "They didn't tell us anything," recalls the 45-year-old Hak, who wears a sheepskin hat and flowing Afghan garments.

KABUL, Afghanistan - A squad of British soldiers armed with automatic weapons peered through last night's mist on the dusty edge of Kabul, hunting an elusive enemy in a landscape of secrets. As Muslim prayers blared from a distant loudspeaker, the soldiers stopped at the edge of a graveyard and gazed at the twisting channels in a broad river plain. "It's like a rabbit warren," said Sgt. Smudge Smith, the patrol leader. "It's like a maze, getting through there." Armed bandits, sometimes traveling in groups of 20, have crossed the river bed to reach the ramshackle neighborhood Barchi, west of central Kabul.

WASHINGTON - U.S. officials are painting an inspiring vision of an Afghanistan free of terrorists, drug growers and smugglers, safe enough for 5 million refugees to return and peaceful enough not to pose a threat to any of its neighbors in that tinderbox region. That would be a tall order in any underdeveloped country, let alone one ravaged by two decades of war. And the United States could find that its military had an easier time reaching its goal - destroying the Taliban regime and breaking up al-Qaida - than its diplomats will have in nurturing a new, stable Afghan government.

KABUL, Afghanistan - At the raucous Sharzoda Currency Exchange, the value of the country's skittish currency is determined these days by one man: the former king, 87-year-old Mohammad Zahir Shah, living in exile near Rome. When the former king said months ago that he planned to return, the afghani, as the currency is known, rose against the dollar. It rose higher when a date for his return was set: Nowruz, the Persian New Year, on March 22. When that deadline came and went, the currency fell.