AFGHANISTAN's new Islamist rulers tightened their grip on the nation yesterday, stopping residents from leaving the capital as Afghanis adjusted to life under a strict fundamentalist regime.
"The people of Kabul are requested not to leave the city. Those who have left already may return and their security will be assured," said Mullah Muhammad Omar, leader and founder of the country's new Taliban militia regime.
Amnesty International accused the Taliban on Wednesday of seizing up to 1,000 prisoners in house to house searches in the capital in what it called a reign of terror.
Responding to accusations of human rights abuses, the new regime denied yesterday that they had been rounding up members of the ousted government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani.
Mullah Omar, in a decree published in the movement's newspaper, Shariat, also renewed calls for the world to recognise the new administration and withdraw accreditation from all former government diplomatic missions.
Witnesses said hundreds of people had been crowding the capital's main bus station at Pul-i-Mahmood Khan in the past few days, heading down the highway to the eastern city of Jalalabad en route to Pakistan.
Taliban fighters, who seized the capital from the relatively moderate Islamic government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani last week, early yesterday stopped some Kabul residents from leaving with their household goods and families, witnesses said.
The puritan Taliban brand of Islam orders men to grow beards and pray five times daily, bans television, cinema and music, and decrees that the sexes should he segregated outside the home. As a result, schools and colleges in Kabul, where 70 per cent of teachers are women, have yet to reopen a week after the Taliban takeover.
Women doctors and nurses are still working at city hospitals assisted by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), although not all have returned for fear of harassment. They may care only for female patients.
"This causes serious disruption, but females have not been denied treatment," said an ICRC employee, adding it would take time for hospitals to adjust to rules already applied in other Taliban held areas where medical staff and patients are separated by sex.
The Taliban brand of sharia law also includes punishments such as death for murder, stoning for adultery and amputation for theft.
But traders are swiftly warming up to life under the new regime, which has given Kabul its first taste of stability after more than four years of factional fighting and destruction.
"Before you had to hide your money well because you never knew when the mujahideen would come looting and business was awful," said a foreign currency dealer in Kabul, referring to the guerrillas who toppled Afghanistan's communist regime in 1992. "But the Taliban are very disciplined, there's no stealing, everything is safe and business is smooth."
The Taliban militia, their movement born in religious schools in refugee camps in Pakistan two years ago, now control about three quarters of Afghanistan. They have cordoned off the Panjsher Valley north east of Kabul after sweeping north from the capital over the past few days, edging towards a battle with the former government military chief, Gen Ahmed Shah Masood's Tajik fighters.
The movement's priority is to clear the strategic Panjsher Valley of pro Rabhani forces led by Gen Masood, who has declared a state of emergency and ordered an evacuation from the valley in anticipation of an attack.
The Talibans appear successful so far in their attempt to prevent a battle with the powerful warlord, Gen Abdul Rashid Dostum, who has marshalled a formidable force of tanks, guns and missiles at a vital tunnel north west of Kabul.
The UN special envoy, Mr Norbert Holl, visited Gen Dostum in his home town of Shibargan and Taliban leaders in Kabul on Wednesday in an attempt to avert a clash of arms.
Sources close to Gen Dostum say he does not want to fight the Taliban but wants to keep them out of the six northern provinces he controls.
The Taliban movement has so far aroused international condemnation over its human rights performance and the treatment of women, while its military drive to extend its control over Afghanistan has provoked alarm among its northern neighbours.
The Commonwealth of Independent States plans to hold a summit starting in the Kazakh capital of Almaty today to discuss the Taliban's stunning rise to power.
Russia's national security leader, Gen Alexander Lebed, said this week that the Taliban posed a threat to Moscow and the borders of Central Asian republics.