HERAT, Afghanistan, 29 August 2004 — The governor of Herat yesterday urged Afghan President Hamid Karzai to put on trial a renegade commander whose forces swept through the province before submitting to a US brokered ceasefire this month. How US-backed Karzai deals with commander Amanullah Khan will be crucial to the number of votes he gets from Herat, in a landmark presidential election on Oct. 9.

On Friday, the government said Amanullah, described as a Taleban chieftain by his enemies, had been brought to Kabul but refused to say if he was being held under some form of arrest.

“We expect the central government to put him on trial for starting the fighting and killing people,” Sayed Nasir Alawi, a spokesman for Herat’s Governor Ismail Khan, told Reuters.

He said 87 troops loyal to the governor were killed in the fighting and some 150 were wounded. He said it was the government’s duty to disarm Amanullah’s militia, which under the terms of the cease-fire withdrew to Shindand, the site of a sprawling former Soviet airbase, some 125 km south of Herat city.

While 18,000 US-led troops and the newly formed Afghan National Army are hunting remnants of the vanquished Taleban in the country’s Pushtun-dominated south and east, the conflict in the western province of Herat may damage Karzai’s standing with non-Pushtuns in an election set to be dominated by security and ethnic issues.

Herat accounts for around 8 percent of the 10 million Afghans registered to vote in the country’s first committed effort at democracy. Tajiks, the largest ethnic minority in Afghanistan form the majority in Herat, which borders Iran.

Ismail Khan, a legendary fighter in the war of liberation against the Soviet Union and one-time prisoner of the Taleban, is a Tajik, whereas Amanullah Khan, like Karzai, is from the country’s Pushtun majority.

Ismail Khan told Reuters yesterday he had not committed his support to anyone in an election that marks the end of the phase of interim and transitional governments headed by Karzai since the fall of the Taleban in late 2001. Ismail Khan also played down talk by a Tajik presidential candidate, Latif Pedram, that he was part of a group of Mujahedeen leaders and the Uzbek Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum searching for a common candidate to field against Karzai.

“No, this is not true. I have not formed any coalition with Pedram, Dostum, Mohaqiq or Qanuni about this,” he said.

Meanwhile, Taleban fighters attacked security checkpoints overnight in the southern Zabul province, killing at least two soldiers of the Afghan National Army, Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press said yesterday. Senior security official Ghulam Jilani told reporters that Taleban attacked the military posts in the border districts of Arghandeb and Khak-e-Afghan on Friday night, killing two government soldiers.