Frontline: Guldara, North of Kabul - Survivor of the holy war

GULDARA IS a lovely village. Set at the foot of a dry rocky hill about 20 miles north of Kabul, its few score mud houses, buttressed with wicker and timber, look out across a broad, flat plain where the brown of dusty fields is broken only by patches of green crops and trees.

In the centre of the village is an old mulberry tree next to a blacksmith's forge. The forge is cold now - unused for months - and a truck with an anti-aircraft gun is parked under the tree. Clear water still runs swiftly through the irrigation channels, but there is no one to divert it over the terraced fields.

The inhabitants of Guldara left late last year when fighters from the Taliban Islamic militia captured the village. Now two substantial farmhouses on a low rise on the village's northern edge are the command and military positions for 250 Taliban troops. In the fields beyond them, trenches and bunkers have been dug through vineyards - the village is known for its grapes. From there, across a hundred or so metres of no man's land are troops loyal to Ahmed Shah Masood, one of the few Afghan commanders still fighting the Taliban's advance.

The Taliban commander in Guldara, Qari Nazar Gul, 30, said it was a quiet day. As he spoke, artillery thudded heavily in the valley below. Every 10 minutes or so his own troops intermittently fired heavy mortars from a dug-out in a small glade of gnarled trees behind the low rise where his farmhouse command post stood. For variety's sake the Taliban twice fired an ancient-looking shoulder-held rocket laun-cher from behind a tank on the crest of the ridge. Each time the enemy replied with rifle fire that cracked and whined through the air.

Qari Nazar Gul, with his weak eyes, wispy black beard and thin shoulders, looked more like a neophyte priest than a seasoned soldier. Instead of a gun beside him he had a plate of newly washed grapes. Yet he had been fighting for three years. There is no concept of leave, or R & R, for the Afghans, so for three years he had been on frontlines, skirmishing, ambushing, watching comrades die, praying, marching, sleeping in the sun.

Sitting on a rolled-up rug in a dusty room in his farmhouse command post he said that he had been fighting in and around Guldara for 14 months.

"We take the village, they push us back a bit, we retake the ground. That is how war is," he said. "Last week they attacked again. They attacked with 600 men but we threw them back and killed many. They left their bodies and weapons all over the fields. Twenty-five of our men were martyred. That, too, is how war is."

In the courtyard of the farmhouse a mortar had been set up. The ground around it was scattered with a bizarre assortment of ammunition. Outside half a dozen of his men, their weapons nowhere in sight, sat with their feet in an irrigation channel, also eating grapes. They had placed their plastic sandals and turbans in a careful row in the dirt beside them.

Qari Nazar Gul joined the Taliban straight from a religious school and survived a series of battles to be among the Taliban troops who seized Kabul exactly two years ago.

"When I heard about the Taliban I put down my books and picked up a gun," he said melodramatically. "We are fighting this holy war to bring the peace of Islam to this country. But I do not involve myself in politics. I am just a soldier.

"These men are criminals and thieves," he said, waving in the direction of the enemy positions. "We will fight them for as long as it takes. One day I would like to go back to my studies, but only God knows when."

For the moment Qari Nazar Gul said his troops spent their days "worshipping, maintaining their weapons, fortifying their positions and waiting".

They may not have that much more waiting to do. A major offensive is planned by the Taliban high command aimed at pushing Masood's forces back into the mountains before the end of next month and the beginning of the snows. Masood is said to have already blown up bridges in preparation for withdrawal. Soon Qari Nazar Gul and his scruffy troops will be eating another village's grapes.