Small groups of guerrillas, led by soldiers from the former Afghan army, have been taking on the Taliban.
Travelling through the scenic Andarab valley north of Kabul there is no visible sign of conflict.
It is difficult to get a sense of the true scale of the fighting - the resistance forces often exaggerate their strength, whilst the Taliban outright deny their presence. In Panjshir, however, anti-Taliban fighters managed to shoot down a military helicopter and capture those on board. But we have been reliably told of an ambush by resistance forces on a Taliban vehicle close to here in May, in which two Taliban members were killed.
A relative of a villager named Abdul Hashim tells us he and three other men were detained and killed by the Taliban immediately after the ambush near Qais Tarrach, after wrongly being accused of involvement in the attack.Abdul Hashim and Noorullah, said to have been detained and killed by the Taliban
"They put me in the back of one pick-up truck, someone pushed our heads down… Noorullah and Abdul Hashim were in another truck - they took them down and behind a Humvee and shot them by a small stream," he said.There are other worrying allegations. A group of four men, travelling towards Tagharak village, a hotspot of resistance activity, were stopped and questioned by the Taliban in June, then allegedly killed.
The Taliban's head of information in Baghlan province, where Andarab is situated, Asadullah Hashimi, rejected the allegations. The Taliban have managed to successfully recruit some locals into their ranks, unlike their previous regime in the 1990s. A number of local Taliban intelligence and police chiefs are Tajik or Persian-speaking, as are some of the soldiers stationed in Andarab.
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