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TIME.com: Eyewitness to war

The sudden surge of the opposition Northern Alliance into previously held Taliban territory in northern Afghanistan occurred with such speed that only now are detailed accounts emerging. Time magazine's team of journalists in Afghanistan covered the campaign and Time.com presents these firsthand accounts of the battles for three major cities -- Mazar-e Sharif, Kabul and Konduz:

Mazar-e Sharif: The slaughter of foreign jihadists

Ustad Atta Mohammed, 37, an ethnic Tajik, is a bearded giant given to joking and easy small talk, and his men have Mazar-e Sharif, but as they consolidated control, they massacred 100 Pakistani Taliban fighters who were trying to surrender -- and then watched as 12 of their own mullahs, on a peace mission to the Taliban resisters, were executed while clutching their holy texts. (Full story)

Kabul: A bloody liberation

A convoy passed abandoned bunkers, some manned by the corpses of Taliban troops. A few hundred yards ahead, Northern Alliance infantrymen exchanged small-arms fire with Taliban stragglers. An alliance foot soldier, hit in the back, lay doubled over in pain. Others rained blows on a captured jihadist as he was crouched toward a jeep. Occasionally a small black puff and a crack would mark the explosion of a rocket-propelled grenade. But the fiercest fighting, a remarkably brief exchange of recoilless rifle and mortar, had tapered off shortly before, and by 4:30 p.m. the brigade rolled over what for two years had been the immovable front line in this war. By dusk all resistance had disappeared. (Full story)

Konduz: After an ambush, a volatile siege

The Konduz front has settled into a tense standoff between Northern Alliance and Taliban forces. Inside Konduz are some 6,000 Taliban and al Qaeda troops, many of them Arab, Chechen or Pakistani holy warriors with no place in this world left to go. (Full story)