GUNNING FOR PEACE: Northern Alliance soldiers guard the Kabul bazaar which is slowly returning to normal. Despite the ongoing Ramzan period of austerity, shops are doing brisk business.

Once a gem of a city, Kabul bears the ongoing war's heartbreaking legacy. The relentless bomb blasts and gunfire in the past month have turned vast sections of the city into rubble that resemble millennia-old ruins more than neighbourhoods built mere decades ago. Now from the rubble, Afghanistan's capital is slowly beginning to rise again.

The second week of Taliban absence in Kabul found most residents scrambling to take advantage of newfound freedom and opportunities. Scores of civil servants laid off or fired by the Taliban-from police officers to schoolteachers-answered a general request from the Northern Alliance, which has taken charge of the city, to return to jobs lost years ago.

Many institutions held "re-inauguration" ceremonies. Boxing, kung fu and bodybuilding clubs reopened their doors to hundreds of teenaged boys. At the Nazir Zalma Supplementary School, Dr Obaid Massoud lectured about 150 students at a gathering to celebrate the end of Taliban rule: "We have experienced something like the Dark Ages in Europe, but we now can express our own points of view. We can have personalities. We can ask, 'Who am I?'"

Although the city remains devoutly Muslim, the holy month of Ramzan began with many residents feeling free to ignore the calls to prayer blaring from mosques throughout the city.
A different kind of music could be heard on the streets, for the first time in years, thanks in part to newly reopened stereo shops and cassette vendors openly selling popular music banned by the Taliban. "People are noticeably happier than they were a couple of weeks ago," says 21-year-old Ajumal Ismael. "You can see it in their faces. Everyone is more relaxed, and you can count more smiles." Ismael went on his first bicycle ride around the city "just for fun".

This is in marked contrast to the despair that had gripped the city after it became known that the US and its allies had decided to target the Taliban regime in Afghanistan for supporting Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaida network.

When the bombing began in October, Kabul entered a twilight zone that saw an almost total blackout of the conditions in the city during that month of fear and devastation. But freed from the repressive Taliban regime, residents have begun to paint a picture of their life on the edge, revealing remarkable endurance of spirit.

Four weeks ago, 23-year-old Jawed Nazir recalls that he and his father stood on the roof of their home to witness the lightning bolts and deafening claps of US bombs pounding Taliban Unit 350, positioned less than a mile away on a slope above their humble Kabul neighbourhood, Sowom-e-Khairkhanah. The blasts shook the mud-brick floor under their feet. Inside, Nazir's mother and younger brother and sisters huddled in a windowless closet of their four-room house to avoid the hazard of flying glass. Between bombing runs, Nazir's mother ran to the kitchen to prepare tea, bread and beans from the rations the family had stockpiled.

"My 13-year-old sister was crying all the time because she was so scared," said Nazir. "But my father was very excited. Every time a bomb exploded on a Taliban position, he would throw his arms in the air and shout, 'Hurrah!'" Such was the sense of fear, anticipation and uncertainty that residents say marked the final weeks of the Taliban's five-year hold on the Afghan capital.

"Everyone was nervous," says taxi driver Mohammed Yosin. "You could see it in people's faces. No one knew what was going to happen." But hardened by more than two decades of war, and in desperate need of money to survive, many people tried to go about their daily business as much as possible. Every day, merchants opened tiny shops and wood-and-aluminium stalls that house most of Kabul's commercial activity. "I would close shop early to get home before dark, so I could be with my family before the bombing started," said Shawali Aziz, who owns a small radio repair shop. "Business was bad, but I felt I needed to keep busy."

Banks remained open throughout the weeks of instability. Despite a lack of staff and funds, the main post office kept sending and receiving letters. Even the electricity flowed almost uninterrupted.

Nazir Ahmad, 25, married 19-year-old Hamida Asmiri two and a half weeks before the Taliban withdrew. The groom draped his car with ribbons, packed it with his friends and picked up his bride for a quick afternoon blessing by a mullah before the newlyweds returned home to their families to await another night of bombing and apprehension. "I would have preferred to get married in a time of peace," Ahmad says, "but I didn't know when that would be."

During the final weeks of its rule, however, the Taliban's grasp on Kabul apparently began to slip dramatically. In the upmarket, tree-lined Wazeer Ahmad Khan neighbourhood, where many Taliban officials lived until a few weeks ago, a sense of near panic was noted in the weeks leading to the fall of the regime. According to those who remain, latest-model Japanese sedans with tinted windows-the preferred mode of transport for the Taliban elite-whisked wives, children and belongings from the two-story walled compounds toward the south and west exits from the city, leaving only men behind.