Afghan Rebel Factions Battling Over Capital : Asia: Rivals turn guns on each other in newly liberated Kabul. Moderates seem to have the advantage.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Fierce tank clashes, artillery duels and street fighting turned this capital into an urban battlefield Sunday, and the coalition of forces under moderate moujahedeen leader Ahmed Shah Masoud appeared to gain a strategic advantage over more radical guerrillas.

Scores were injured and at least a dozen killed as Masoud’s fighters and a militia force loyal to former regime Gen. Abdul Rasul Dostam fought side by side through the day and night in an effort to drive out followers of radical fundamentalist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Masoud’s coalition appeared to have the upper hand after 24 hours of combat, which broke out just hours after the moujahedeen rebels separately gobbled up the capital’s most strategic installations and, for a brief moment, celebrated the liberation of Kabul from a failed and demoralized regime with a startling display of tracer fire.

But the guns soon lowered on each other. Masoud’s holy warriors fought for four hours beginning at dawn to take the whole of the presidential palace compound from Hekmatyar’s forces. At least 50 of Masoud’s soldiers were wounded during a morning-long artillery duel for the strategic fort of Bala Hissar on the city’s southwest fringes, the key entry point for Hekmatyar forces in the south.

Masoud and Dostam later called in air strikes and artillery bombardments, both to clear Hekmatyar’s positions and to protect a vital airlift bridge that was rushing reinforcements from their strongholds in the north.

But Hekmatyar’s key backers remained holed up in their stronghold at Kabul’s downtown Interior Ministry.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose plan to restore peace collapsed with the fall of President Najibullah earlier this month, pleaded for an end to the bloodshed.

“Now is the time for healing, tolerance and forgiveness,” he told reporters in Islamabad, Pakistan.

The rival forces that carved a checkerboard of fortified military installations throughout the city, suburbs and the villages outside Kabul are largely divided along ethnic lines, with Hekmatyar’s extremist Pushtun followers from the south now ranged against Masoud’s coalition of mostly Uzbeks and Tajiks from the north.

The bitter combat and deepening ethnic divide that drove most Kabulis into their homes Sunday and paralyzed the city with fear also sidetracked a Masoud-backed compromise Islamic government of moderate resistance leaders, who could not enter the capital through Sunday’s chaos to fill the nation’s political vacuum. Their plane was expected to arrive today, the 14th anniversary of the Soviet-backed coup that brought the authoritarian regime to power, but it was unclear how much authority the leaders would have.

Hekmatyar, who was the sole leader among a fractious 10-party moujahedeen resistance to reject the compromise, clearly had made good on his vow to try to take Kabul by force Sunday.

And the radical leader staged his battle for control of Kabul just as analysts had predicted, both from strongholds within the city and from strategic regions beyond the mountains that surround it.

In the days before Saturday’s mad moujahedeen rush on the leaderless capital, where regime soldiers laid down weapons and headed homeward by the thousands Saturday, Hekmatyar had used the longstanding ethnic conflict between Pushtuns and non-Pushtuns to recruit potentially powerful new followers.

Beginning as early as last weekend, Hekmatyar’s top strategists and guerrilla commanders reportedly infiltrated the city and struck deals with top regime officials.

Diplomatic sources and Hekmatyar’s commanders confirmed reports Sunday that Najibullah’s interior minister, Raz Mohammed Paktin, had secretly joined forces with Hekmatyar last week and permitted his guerrilla commanders to enter and secure the large ministry complex early Saturday.

Joining forces with Hekmatyar and Paktin, a member of the long-ruling Communist Party and an ethnic Pushtun, were two key regime military officers known for their Pushtun nationalist sentiments, Defense Minister Mohammed Aslam Watanjar and Maj. Gen. Mohammed Rafi.

Rafi is a Soviet-trained tank officer and Politburo member who kept the regime forces together after Najibullah went into hiding April 15. Both men have played key roles in the coups and countercoups that have marked the past two decades of Afghan history.

“Hekmatyar won all three over by pushing the ethnic issue,” one senior regime source said. “The Pushtuns have ruled this country for most of its history, and he convinced them that they could prevent a takeover by Masoud’s coalition.”

A spokesman for Dostam known as Col. Nawab said Sunday that all three men are inside the Interior Ministry complex, which the forces of Masoud and Dostam said they plan to assault sometime today in what they billed as the last critical push before they could secure the city.

Although former regime troops loyal to the three officials fought alongside Hekmatyar’s forces during Sunday’s critical battle for Bala Hissar, it appeared that by nightfall the combined Hekmatyar faction had been driven out of its positions in Kabul’s nearby Martyr’s Cemetery and away from their mountaintop positions overlooking the Masoud-held fort.

Calling Bala Hissar “the strategic landmark” of Kabul and the presidential palace its symbolic power source, Nawab said that “the strategy is to drive them out into the mountains around the city, secure the city and then bring in the interim council, which we support.”

Nawab conceded that Hekmatyar’s antiaircraft positions scattered throughout the city are hampering the coalition forces’ efforts to airlift reinforcements from Dostam’s base in Mazar-i-Sharif in the far north and Masoud’s stronghold 35 miles outside the city in Charikar, where 200 coalition tanks are blocked by Hekmatyar’s positions along the road to the capital.

The colonel conceded that the coalition had, indeed, fired the first shots Sunday. “We had to,” he said, “because Hekmatyar wanted to take all the power of government for their own groups.”