11.30 am - By RICHARD LLOYD PARRY
Groups of Taleban militiamen in Afghanistan have fired on one another in open street battles in the first sign of a serious breakdown of discipline within the regime, according to the United Nations in Pakistan.
According to the Office of the UN Coordinator for Afghanistan, law and order in parts of Afghanistan is beginning to break down in ways which would have been unthinkable a month ago.
In the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, close to the front line of the civil war against the opposition Northern Alliance, rogue Taleban groups raided a local UN office on Saturday, beat up its Taleban guards and exchanged gunfire with Taleban policemen who came to its protection.
In the city of Maimana in the northwest of the country, as well as in Mazar-i-Sharif, de-mining organisations have had their vehicles and equipment stolen. Taleban commanders in other parts of the country have forcibly attempted to billet their troops in premises owned by aid agencies, in an apparent attempt to deter attack by increasing the risk to civilian life.
The reports suggest that the bombing is indeed corroding the Taleban's cohesion and esprit de corps. But they also hint at the kind of violent anarchy into which Afghanistan could quickly sink, if the bombing eventually destroys the Taleban as an organisation.
The UN's informants also report that civilians, including local UN aid workers, continue to be killed and injured by stray bombs like the ones that killed scores or even hundred in villages eastern Afghanistan last week.
"The law and order situation within Afghanistan appears to be deteriorating fast," said Stephanie Bunker, spokesperson for the Office of the UN Coordinator.
"We're very concerned about the safety and security of people there. The UN expects all parties to respect the rights of civilians and to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants."
When the world at large first began to hear of the mysterious army of fundamentalist students known as the Taleban, there were several things about them that fascinated and alarmed.
There was their leader - Mullah Omar, the former peasant turned Islamic Robin Hood, who lost his right eye to a Soviet rocket in 1989.
There was the medieval simplicity of the Taleban faith, with its literalist interpretation of the Koran, and its reverence for relics, such as the cloak of the Prophet Mohammed.
But above all there was the fearful purity of the society which it quickly imposed upon the country. Television, sculpture, painting and all other forms of entertainment were banned; women were not allowed to work or attend school, or even to make a noise with their shoes as they walked. The Taleban were equally uncompromising in their punishment of crime: for adultery, flogging; for theft, amputation; for homosexuality, execution by being crushed to death beneath a collapsed wall.
The Taleban might be cruel, fanatical and oppressive, but they were never arbitrary or inconsistent, unlike the vindictive bandit-warlords who had wrought such chaos in the period after the Soviet withdrawal. Until, that is, the beginning of the US-British bombing campaign nine days ago.
Apart from the damage to Afghanistan's airports, and the many civilians who have died beneath the rubble of their villages, reports received by the United Nations in Pakistan suggest they have had another dramatic effect: finally, under the pressure of imminent collapse, the Taleban's notorious moral purity is beginning to flake around the edges.
The most alarming of the incidents took place three days ago in Mazar-i-Sharif where the Taleban are increasingly hard-pressed by the Northern Alliance, as well as by the coalition bombing campaign. On Saturday, according to the UN's sources in Mazar-i-Sharif, a bomb fell in the city centre, landing between government building and a busy market, killing four women and one man, and terrifying market goers.
On the same day, what the UN describes as "armed elements" - code for rogue Taleban groups - made a violent assault on a house inhabited by the UN's Afghan staff. "They tied up and beat up the Taleban guards outside the house, and then they tied up and beat up the UN guards inside," Ms Bunker said yesterday in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
"The Taleban police were there immediately, and they controlled the situation, but there was shooting between the police and the armed elements, and a passer by was injured."
Such a confrontation - during an attempt to seize a UN building and pitching Taleban against Taleban - is entirely new and suggests that the US may be right in one of its assumptions about the Taleban: that beneath its smooth and moral exterior, it contains fault lines and fissures which the pressure of the bombing campaign could open up.
For all the conviction of its leaders, this theory has it, at its margins the Taleban is made up of elements who identify with it for their own convenience, because it has been the strongest and most credible power in the country. As that power is threatened, this thinking goes, they will revert to type - that of bandit warlords.
Over the weekend, similar incidents occurred in Mazar-i-Sharif, the northwest city of Maimana in Faryab province, and the Taleban's power base of Kandahar. Non-governmental organisations that remove Afghanistan's many land mines had their premises raided and their vehicles and equipment stolen. One organisation lost nine of its four-wheel drive pick-up trucks, the vehicles which - with machine guns and armed men loaded into their backs, make up the famous Taleban "cavalry".
In Mazar-i-Sharif, loyalist Taleban commander tried unsuccessfully to requisition NGO offices for their troops, part of what UN officials say is a pattern of relocating military facilities close to civilian premises. The risks associated with the bombing are demonstrated by other stories passed to the UN.
In the city of Kandahar, bombs struck a court building only 200m from the offices of the UN High Commission for Refugees. They were undamaged this time, but in Peshawar a bomb exploded perilously close to a World Food Programme warehouse after apparently missing a military parking area 500m away. A local UN worker, who was doing loading work was injured by shrapnel.
Meanwhile, the bombing and ongoing civil war is causing further humanitarian suffering. Half a million internal refugees who were scattered across north-central Afghanistan have disappeared from the view of UN workers after being forced to uproot once again by the civil war.
"They're on the move again, and we don't know where," said Ms Bunker. "We have so little capacity anyway and it was hard enough when we knew where they were. Now it's virtually impossible ... We are facing the most serious complex emergency situation in the world ever."
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Map: Opposing forces in the war against terror
A woman in her 50s has been rushed to hospital with significant injuries.