Afghan artillery clashes leave scores dead : AZ IMC

The ethnic Uzbek Junbish faction of General Abdul Rashid Dostum overran several districts west of the northern capital of Mazar-i-Sharif in fighting involving tanks, artillery and mortars that began on Wednesday and continued overnight, an official of the rival Jamiat faction said on Thursday.

General Abdul Saboor told Reuters at least 60 from Jamiat had been killed or wounded but gave no breakdown. Junbish official Said Nurullah said on Wednesday three of its soldiers were killed and four hurt in a Jamiat ambush in the Fayzabad area.

Residents of Mazar could hear artillery fire to the west and a resident of Balkh, about 20 km (12 miles) from Mazar said Junbish had stationed over 20 tanks there.

A spokesman for the United Nations, which runs aid programmes from Mazar-i-Sharif, said the fighting was some of the worst seen in north and was of "great concern".

Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali told reporters he would lead a delegation to Mazar on Thursday aiming to ease tensions and implement military and administrative reforms.

He said the military reforms would involve the collection of heavy weapons and a regrouping of military forces.

"Around Mazar-i-Sharif the situation is not good," he said.

He said he had spoken to the leaders of the two factions, Ustad Atta Mohammad and Dostum, both of whom are government officials, and they had pledged to try to defuse the situation, which they blamed on incidents at a "lower level".

COMMANDERS "COOPERATING"

"They are cooperating and talking to the government," he said.

Jalali said both men had pledged to cooperate with a crucial U.N.-supervised factional disarmament process due to start in the north later this month and in the Mazar area in November.

The clashes broke out even as the defence ministry, United Nations and Japan signed an agreement in Kabul on Wednesday on the ambitious plan to demobilise 100,000 factional fighters.

These factional militias are seen as the main threat to President Hamid Karzai's efforts to extend his influence into unruly provinces and underscores the problems he faces as he contends with stepped up Taliban guerrilla attacks in the south.

The fighting also shows the potential risks to foreign peacekeepers once NATO expands its operations outside Kabul.

Junbish and the mainly Takik Jamiat have clashed repeatedly since the Taliban's overthrow by U.S.-led forces in late 2001 and past U.N.-brokered disarmament drives have failed.

With tension high in Mazar, Mohammad Iftikhari, the security commander in the city, which is controlled by both Junbish and Jamiat, declared a night-time curfew on Wednesday.

U.N. spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said he did not have casualty figures, but the fighting had been intense and there appeared to have been "a high number". "There has been the use of tanks, which we haven't seen for a long time," he said.

The clashes had forced a suspension of U.N. road missions west of Mazar, although the city itself was calm except for tank movements in the west of the city.

Silva said there was a limit to what the international community, including a British civilian-military Provincial Military Reconstruction Team in Mazar, could do.

"These two parties have two leaders who are responsible for their forces," he said. "They are responsible for the fighting, as they should be for stopping the fighting."

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