. What unfolded in Mazar on Saturday, August 8, and in the days that followed, was slaughter of a scale and brutality without precedent in 20 years of turmoil in Afghanistan. It has brought West Asia face to face with the prospect of wider war and a spreading virus of Shia-Sunni violence. The truth was slow to reach the outside world. The sole foreign reporter in the city, Iranian Mahmud Saremi, was shot dead with eight diplomats by men the Taliban leadership later described as "renegades". Then, ominously, the radical Sunni militia imposed a news blackout ...

Drawn from eyewitness accounts from all the city's racial groups - Hazara, Uzbek, Tajik and Pushtun – their picture is of an officially directed ethnic pogrom in which as many as 6,000 may have been butchered, One senior U.N. official sees "echoes of Srebrenica", the Bosnian "safe- haven" where in July 1995 the Serb military systematically slaughtered thousands of unarmed Muslim males .

No one will ever know how many innocents died in the rape of Mazar. The Taliban certainly were not counting and if they had been would not be telling. Today a traumatized city is liming back to a semblance of normality, though half of its shops are still shuttered.

For its surviving Shia population, many still cowering in their homes, the message has been unambiguous. Their mosques have been closed. And in ranting speeches broadcast on radio, Taliban commissar Niazi has set forth three stark choices: convert to Sunni Islam, go to Shia Iran or die. As they promised in1995, the Taliban have indeed brought to a once vibrant city the twin blessings of Islam and peace - the twisted Islam of the sectarian bigot and the peace of the dead, (Source: Michael Winchester in Asiaweek, 6November, 1998)