By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 12, 2001; Page A17

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, Nov. 11 -- Women walked in the streets without veils for the first time in more than two years in Mazar-e Sharif today as the city in northern Afghanistan began to emerge from Taliban rule, residents and Northern Alliance officials said.

Authorities began planning to reopen schools, closed for 27 months. Women prayed at the central mosque for the first time since the Taliban seized the city in 1999.

The television station prepared to go back on the air. And a warlord, who helped oust the Taliban, broadcast a radio appeal to residents to embrace newly discovered freedoms.

"I said we won, people can celebrate," even as bodies of enemy soldiers lay unburied in the streets, Abdurrashid Dostum, the general leading the alliance forces that retook the city Friday, said by telephone.

"I said we won't treat people like the Taliban. We don't say that children should not go to schools and women should not work," said Dostum, who earlier broadcast his message on Radio Balkh, which was freed from Taliban control. "Women of Afghanistan have the same rights as women of other countries."

Dostum, who lost Mazar-e Sharif in August 1998 after a reign that was often oppressive, joined with former rivals within the Northern Alliance today in agreeing to remove military rule over the city.

The agreement was a sharp departure from their past bitter competition, indicating a determined effort on the part of the Northern Alliance to end the fractious infighting that had undermined its efforts to unify the country.

Northern Alliance officers have confirmed that a split between Dostum and Gen. Attah Mohammad led to the failure to take the city three weeks ago. They reconciled and agreed to work together under Gen. Mohammed Fahim, the alliance's defense chief.

"We don't want to have the military men in Mazar-e Sharif," Mohammad Mohaqiq, who presided over the extraordinary summit of generals in the city, said by telephone. "We are planning to replace the military people with civil authorities. We don't want them intertwined in the population."

Dostum, Mohammad and representatives of the Hizb-i-Wahdat-i-Islami political party each agreed to station the bulk of their forces in separate camps outside and to the south of the city, Mohaqiq said.

Each of the three forces will send 100 men to share a garrison inside Mazar-e Sharif, which will be administered by civil authorities under former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was ousted by the Taliban.

"We decided the armies should go to the outskirts of the city," said Mohaqiq, a commander of the party forces in Mazar-e Sharif and a former minister under Rabbani. "We don't want the military to stay in the city, because people should not have any fear."

Still unclear is the extent of the casualties from Friday's battle for Mazar-e Sharif. Dostum acknowledged that bodies of Taliban soldiers lie in the streets. He said he has urged city elders and sanitation workers to collect the bodies, wrap them in sheets and bury them. He said he did not know how many were killed.

"If the Taliban want to take their relatives, we do not object," he added. "It is Islamic law to give the bodies to their relatives. They are free to come to collect the bodies."

People contacted in Mazar-e Sharif by telephone suggested that many greeted with relief the end of the rule of the Taliban, whose interpretation of Islamic law forced women to wear veils and dictated that they not work.

"People are happy. They're starting to go back to work," said Zilmai, who like many Afghans uses only one name. "Not many shops are open yet, but for the first time the women are going to the mosque."

Dostum said he strolled about the city and was surprised at how many women had emerged and had publicly greeted him, an act that would not have been allowed under Taliban rule.

"I haven't seen so many people except at a holiday," Dostum said. "I was surprised at how many women were out -- more women than men. I can't describe to you how people were delighted."

Mohaqiq, who received his religious training in Iran, signaled the return of a more tolerant form of Islam.

"During the Taliban time, people became backward and old-fashioned," Mohaqiq said. "Now they are living in the modern world. We have made a step toward a new life."