The day Kabul fell

The day Kabul fell I saw crowds cheering and women waving. It felt like liberation. But I also saw the evidence of butchery and bloody revenge

Past a road littered with the corpses of murdered Taliban fighters, I walked into liberated city of Kabul as dawn broke over the Hindu Kush. It seemed the entire city had turned out to greet the first Western reporters over the front line, ahead even of the victorious Northern Alliance army and only hours after the Taliban had scuttled away in the night.

Crowds of exuberant local people cheered and danced as we walked nervously through the city outskirts. Men and boys milled around shaking my hand and shouting, "Zindabad," or "Long life," and the women on the buses, still cowled in the stifling blue burqas, waved openly and lifted their veils to smile. Until yesterday, such public gestures by women would have unthinkable. Under the rule of Taliban mullahs for a woman to smile at a foreigner or even laugh was a crime punishable by flogging.

It felt like a real liberation. But Kabul's first day of freedom was also marked by butchery. The long-downtrodden residents rose and exacted revenge against any foreign supporters of the Taliban they could get their hands on. In the city's Shahr-i-naw park, the bodies of seven black-turbaned militiamen who appeared to be Pakistanis and Arabs, lay murdered, with cash stuffed into their mouths, a tradition Afghan gesture of humiliation. One of them had been strangled and had cassette tape draped around his neck, another pointless show of defiance to the departed Taliban rulers.

Our 12-mile journey from the front line to Kabul began with a dash across the Shomali Plain with thousands of wild-looking and newly uniformed Northern Alliance soldiers hell-bent on capturing the city.

We passed scenes of utter desolation where densely packed villages of the plain had been laid waste by the Taliban. The religious fanatics had swept through two years ago, chopping down trees, burning vineyards and orchards and even setting fire to the humble mud houses.

And then we saw by the roadside, the bodies of seven Northern Alliance defectors who paid the ultimate price for joining the Taliban. The dead included a well-known commander, Agha Shireen.

Everywhere in Kabul yesterday the men had already shaved off their beards in small but telling acts of defiance. Others had taken off the hated turbans imposed by the Taliban regime. And there were chants of "Death to the Taliban" and "Death to Pakistan".

When we reached the Kabul front line, Northern Alliance troops turfed us out of our Jeep and added it to the impromptu barricade of tanks and armoured vehicles already blocking the road and stopping the great advance of the 10,000 Alliance forces in its tracks. For now the capital city was spared the massacres and wild looting that marked the capture of the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif on Friday.

Some were holding up portraits of their leader, Ahmed Shah Masood, assassinated by two suicide bombers posing as journalists two days before the 11 September attacks.

The soldiers guarding the barricade wanted to keep us out, too, but when I explained I wanted to walk into the city from which I had been expelled by the Taliban in March they relented. As soon as we were across the line an extraordinary scene developed with people massing around us. Everyone was ecstatic at the overthrow of the Taliban, the rustic mullahs who had imposed their medieval village ways on the once-sophisticated city. I found an old friend who embraced me and invited me to get into his taxi.

But as we approached the city centre, the mood changed, tension rose. The place felt frighteningly out of control. Some abandoned Taliban homes had been looted, armed men were driving around in cars, gangs of youths brandishing weapons roamed the city, despite the 2,500 Northern Alliance police who showed up at midday.

I went with my translator to see his mother, Soroj, in a relatively well-off part of the city. After listening to my radio reports, she had been worried sick about her son: I had told listeners we were crouched on a roof in a bulge of Northern Alliance territory jutting into Taliban areas, feeling the ground shudder as American bombs crashed down. Now she knew we were safe. We all embraced and the tears flowed.

Walking round the neighbourhood where I had lived before my expulsion, the reception was extraordinary. People invited me in for tea, an act of normal Afghan hospitality that had become unthinkable under the Taliban.

But there were also incredible mood swings, as jubilation was replaced by spasms of anxiety. Some of the men had not shaved off their beards, saying they would wait until tomorrow, in case the feared religious police returned. Women were unwilling to throw off their burqas for the same reason.

Music that had been banned for five years was suddenly blaring from radios. Men were exuberantly honking their car horns and ringing their bicycle bells in sheer joy.

At the foreign ministry, where lower-ranking officials had been forced to wear turbans, all were bare-headed or with caps, and they were grinning broadly. I finally headed for the Intercontinental Hotel, and found another miracle, hot water to wash in.