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themselves the murder of Dr. Najibullah, and they reported home to their wives, sisters, and mothers the extraordinary scene they had witnessed. The message could not be mistaken: a new regime was in charge.
    Kamila's father worried about what would happen to his own family now that he could see how the Taliban would deal with its enemies. He had, after all, served under Dr. Najibullah and worked with Massoud, the Panjshiri fighter who had become the Taliban's biggest foe and still commanded enough forces to stop them from controlling the entire country. But Mr. Sidiqi urged his daughters not to be concerned. “I'm just an old retiree; I've got nothing at all to do with politics,” he reassured them. As the days passed, however, Kamila grew more uneasy. The Taliban began harassing young Tajik men, rounding them up from mosques and bazaars on suspicion of providing arms and information to Massoud's forces, which were now making a stand north of Kabul. Taliban soldiers with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders patrolled the city in their tanks and trucks, looking to stamp out trouble and crush any opposition.
    Mr. Sidiqi, an educated man who had traveled the country during his army days and believed that ethnic differences should not matter to Afghans, struggled to explain to his daughters why these men had ample reason to fear the world beyond their refugee camps. Many of them were orphans whose parents had been killed when Soviet bombs laid waste to their southern villages. The Russian invasion, he said, had taken these soldiers' families and their homes. They had never gotten to know their country, or its capital. “I think this is the first a lot of these boys have seen of Kabul,” he told the girls, “and probably the first time they've seen so many people from so many different backgrounds.” Most had grown up in refugee camps in the southern and eastern regions of Pakistan. What little grounding they had in their own history had come through the filter of barely educated, deeply religious madrassa teachers who schooled them in a singular, unforgiving interpretation of Islam very different from the Afghan tradition. In the camps in which they had grown up, many refugee families kept their wives and daughters indoors nearly all the time to ensure their safety and honor. “These young men who serve under the Taliban's white flag have had almost no contact with women during their entire lives,” Mr. Sidiqi told his daughters. Indeed, their training had taught them to avoid exposure to the amoral temptation of the other sex, whose rightful place was at home behind closed doors. This made the life and culture of the urban capital appear even more foreign and bewildering to the young soldiers who were now in charge of its streets. Through their eyes, Kabul looked like a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah where women roamed freely and alone, wearing seductive makeup and Western-style clothing; where storekeepers did not faithfully heed the call to prayer; where excesses thrived and alcohol was plentiful. Kabul to these zealous young men was a sinful city full of crime and debauchery and desperately in need of spiritual cleansing.
    Kabulis watched helplessly as the Taliban began reshaping the cosmopolitan capital according to their utopian vision of seventh-century Islam. Almost immediately they instituted a brutal--and effective--system of law and order. Accused thieves had one hand and one foot cut off, and their severed limbs were hung from posts on street corners as a warning to others. Overnight, crime in the monumentally lawless city dropped to almost zero. Then they banned everything they regarded as a distraction from the duty of worship: music, long a part of Afghan culture, and movies, television, card playing, the game of chess, and even kite flying, the popular Friday afternoon pastime. And they didn't stop at actions alone: creating a representation of the human figure was soon forbidden, as was wearing European