(Excerpts from Thomas Walkom, October 7, 2001, "Unholy Alliance," in the Toronto Star)

Senior members of the Northern Alliance, including former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, have been cited by the U.S. for human-rights abuses. Deputy-premier Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the alliance's number two political figure, is a hard-line, Islamic fundamentalist who, according to one Associated Press report, won't even speak to women.

In 1995, according to the U.S. State Department, the 'Northern Alliance', under the command of Ahmed Shah Massood (celebrated by Western journalists as the "Lion of the Panjshir" until his untimely assassination last month) - went on a rampage "systematically looting whole streets and raping women."

The position of women is not expected to improve under a Northern Alliance government. They tried to introduce a rigorous brand of Islamic law to the parts of Afghanistan they controlled well before the Taliban became a force. In 1992, when Rabbani, Sayyaf, Massood and other US-funded mujahideen captured the country's capital, Kabul, one of their first acts was to ban the use of female newsreaders on television. Two years later, and still before the Taliban took Kabul, the UN reported that women in the capital were being told to quit their jobs and wear the full-length burqa. Women who didn't comply were liable to be raped by members of the various mujahideen militias that prowled the city.