Afghanistan's opposition alliance has written to the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, accusing the Taliban Islamic militia of massacring more than 600 civilians in the north-east of the country, UN sources said yesterday.
They said the alliance administration of the ousted president, Mr Burhannuddin Rabbani, had sent the letter to Mr Annan on Tuesday, saying retreating Taliban fighters had committed the "indiscriminate massacre of local unarmed civilians" in four villages and a district centre in Faryab province last Thursday and Friday.
But the Taliban government in Kabul, which controls about two-thirds of Afghanistan and accuses the opposition forces of killing an estimated 2,000 Taliban fighters captured in northern Afghanistan last May, described the report as "fabricated and baseless".
A UN source in Islamabad said it appeared information from contacts suggested there had been "some killings" in Faryab but it was not immediately clear how many.
A Western source in Kabul also quoted the northern Afghan warlord, Gen Abdul Rashid Dostum, as accusing the Taliban militia of killing "many civilians" while retreating from Qaisar district.
The source said Gen Dostum had described the killings as "a big crime" but had not given the exact toll. Qaisar was the scene of heavy fighting for several days last month between the Taliban and fighters loyal to Gen Dostum.
The Taliban, which is mainly Sunni Muslim and ethnic Pashtun, controls around two-thirds of Afghanistan, including the capital, Kabul. Its radical former student leadership is bent on imposing a pure Islamic state and a strict interpretation of Sharia law.
The opposition letter, sent by its administration's vice-foreign minister, Dr A. Abdullah, said about 20,000 civilians, mostly women and children, had fled the area to the nearby Almar district and the Faryab provincial capital, Maimana.
The letter, a copy of which was made available in Islamabad, said the Taliban had "continued indiscriminate massacres of local unarmed inhabitants in the villages of Hazar Qala, Charshanbe, Kohi, Shor and the administrative centre of Qaiser district [which] totalled more than 600, resulting in a coercive exodus, in bone-chilling cold winter, of as many as 20,000 civilians".
Eyewitnesses in the province reported mass burials of civilians "where Taliban occupying mercenary forces have for weeks now been trying to crush a popular resistance movement", the letter said.
The opposition appealed to Mr Annan to send a UN fact-finding mission to the area.
Last month Gen Dostum accused a rival opposition figure, Gen Abdul Malik, of killing about 2,000 Taliban fighters in May after a brief anti-Dostum pact with the militia and burying them in mass graves. Gen Malik, now reported by Taliban to be living in exile in Iran, denies the charge.
A UN investigator who visited the mass graves found that hundreds of captives were thrown down wells and then killed with grenades.