On cue, a tank opens fire on distant Taliban positions with a sudden blast. For an hour, shells whiz back and forth over my head, which I keep low, pressed hard against the crumbling mud walls of a trench. I cover my purple bandana–a permanent fashion accessory in this conservative Muslim country–with a white scarf in hopes that it will protect me from becoming a sniper target by blending into the landscape, and I struggle to distinguish between the whistle of incoming fire and the pop of outgoing rounds. Bang! Whiz! Boom! Smoke rises from the trench opposite. A radio call: "Our mujahideen are capturing that post. Do not shoot." As the fading sunlight grows long and low, a line of Northern Alliance soldiers in crisp new uniforms follow behind a tank up a hillside toward Taliban positions.

Some 36 hours earlier, I had hitched a ride on the back of an armored personnel carrier headed to the front line. We roared through villages of crumbling mud-brick huts, the lights from the tanks behind us illuminated the silhouettes of villagers watching the parade of soldiers and heavy weapons. Sparks from the engines flew past me. The night seemed bright with stars as we rumbled toward war.

November 11: A boy named Nasir is eager to show off his find. He takes a watch from his vest pocket, its hands stilled at 6:45, just a few hours after start of the Northern Alliance assault yesterday. "I shot him in the chest," Nasir says, mimicking the sound of two gunshots "Ta! Ta!" as he grins and gestures with his Kalashnikov. "We had taken the post and I went around looking for injured Talibs to kill. I was very angry. This guy was in his trench, and when he saw me he said something in a language I didn't understand and put up his hands as if to say, 'Don't kill me.' But I killed him."

The mujahideen claimed huge victories in last night's battles. Salim, a soldier from the Mazar-e Sharif battalion, boasts of taking five Taliban posts before apparently accidental American bombing interrupted their rapid advance. Next to him, three kids play wrestle; one has a radio whining Tajik love songs, the other has a Kalashnikov.

At lunchtime, Mohammed Eisan, a tank commander, invited me to share his meal of beans, potatoes, and rice. A short man with a thick beard and sad eyes, he poured water from a glass to wash my hands and called me 'sister.' He says it has been 10 years since he left behind his one-year-old son in the care of an uncle in Konduz (Eisan's wife died during childbirth, just as his own mother did). "It has been impossible to talk to him because if the Taliban knew he talked to his father, they would kill him," he says matter of factly. " I call you my sister because it makes me happy to sit with you." The commanders sit cross-legged in a circle around me on a mat on a dirt patch between two tanks. A tank roars by, and suddenly the world is yellow as it rains dust. "I sometimes see my home, my wife, my child in a dream," says Eisan. "When we arrive in Konduz, I can see my family, inshallah [God willing]." As I leave, he waves both hand frantically, and then rubs them over his face as if in prayer.

November 12: My friend Volker Handloik, a 40-year-old German on assignment for Stern magazine, was killed last night. He got on an armored personnel carrier at 6:30 p.m., just after I had left. It had been euphoric at the Chagatai post as the radio cracked with reports that the town of Taloqan had fallen to the rebels. A huge cheer went up, soldiers fired their guns into the air in celebration. Six reporters scrambled onto an APC with commander Bashir to go to a captured Taliban position and watch the surrender. As it turned out, the Talibs were lying in wait and launched a grenade at the APC. One French radio journalist was killed instantly. Three hung on and survived as the APC swung around in retreat. But Volker and another French journalist fell off. We spent the night huddled around a radio at Commander Hassan's house, frantically seeking help from rebel units.

This morning, we brought the three bodies back across the Kukcha River, slung across the rear of an APC. When we stopped on the other side, the soldiers dumped water from a bucket to wash blood off the stretchers but didn't help with the bodies. After all, these were not their men–just as the dozens that had been brought back from the front lines last night had not been ours, I realized. But Volker was. As colleagues Heathcliff and David carefully lifted down his body, I could see that his hands were up–was it in surrender to the Taliban, who then shot him, or had Northern Alliance soldiers lifted them up later to get at his pockets? When the bodies were found, they had nothing on them, even their pants had been cut open to get at money belts. (The bodies of the three journalists were transported to a hospital in Khoja Bahauddin to await an airlift home.)

Back on the front lines, soldiers swagger down a mountain with huge packs, showing off their booty from the Taliban. Habibullah, a mad, cross-eyed fighter, brandishes a large sword. "Ha, I killed a Talib and took this from him. Take my picture." Every hour, it seems, another province falls. Huge trucks are being loaded with weapons, ammunition, cooking pots, all captured from the Taliban, all going to the new front lines near Konduz. Four thousand soldiers pile into whatever vehicles they can find to head down the road. It is time to move on.

November 13: A soldier named Hamidullah guides us on the road to Taloqan. Open fields, abandoned villages, and, here and there, scraps of an exploded truck. This was Taliban country. We drive carefully, smack in the middle of the tank tracks, having heard that there are mines along the way. We pass a cotton field, branches covered in fluff. "Local people planted this three years ago, but they couldn't pick it because it was too dangerous," Hamidullah says. The village, freed from the Taliban yesterday, consists of a strip of destroyed mud-brick houses. Its name, Hazar Bagh, means "one thousand gardens."

Just as we arrive in Taloqan, the news comes that Kabul has fallen. Gunshots ring out as Northern Alliance soldiers celebrate and test their newly acquired Taliban guns. Taloqan seems surprisingly normal for a place liberated just two days ago–tree-lined streets, shops selling cakes and radios, and the first paved road I have seen in Afghanistan. But a closer look finds disturbing details: a tree decorated with long strands of audiotape, like Christmas tinsel, ripped from music cassettes by the Taliban. At a stall selling sugar, batteries, and shampoo, pictures of smiling women with lustrous hair on the shampoo ads are scratched out vigorously with pens.

But there is still possibly the biggest fight to go, and the rebels–do we still call them that after capturing the capital?–are arriving to lay siege to the thousands of Talibs who have retreated to Konduz. The road toward Konduz is a sea of brown mujahideen hats as soldiers saunter toward the front line. Some go in packed trucks, some by horse-drawn carriages ornately decorated with fake roses, but most by foot, weapons hanging casually. Two young men hold hands and swing them as they walk, as if buddies on a school field trip. "We are going to fight." "We are going to the front line."

At Taloqan's high school, the commander holds a rally. He stands above the rows of hundreds of men, all dressed in tunics with assorted weaponry, and recites from the Koran. The men cry out, "Allah Akbar [God is great]." He says, "We came down from the mountains and captured most of Afghanistan in a short time. The Taliban killed many of our people. They slashed our people's stomachs with knives. They poured our people's blood. Now, at this moment, they are defeated. Congratulations to all the people of Afghanistan!" A cry goes up, "Allah Akbar!" They head off down the road, a river of fighters surging toward the front. On one side, there is a spectacular mountain range, its foot lined with flags fluttering from the graves of martyrs.

November 14: I wake up at 5 to go to the front line, having heard rumors that today is the day of the assault on Konduz. We fear it will be a bloodbath, since the foreign Taliban fighters refuse to surrender. But the tide is coming the other way today. Children carrying tin pails, old men driving donkeys strapped down with mattresses and blankets, veiled women carrying dirty-faced babies. While most refugees have been heading home to newly freed areas, these people were just forced to flee their village by the Taliban's ethnic cleansing. "Now, the village is the front line of the Taliban," says Noornisa, who has pushed up her burka to reveal her creased face. She sits on the edge of the road, three of her children around her, waiting for her husband, who has only one leg and is coming by donkey. "They said we were all Tajiks and Uzbeks and were helping the Northern Alliance. They said, 'If you don't leave now, we will kill all of you.' "

November 15: Hajji Shah Mahmud's Restaurant is the Rick's Cafe of Taloqan. Everyone is here: Kalashnikov-toting soldiers, refugees waiting to go home, and an international cast of correspondents. Newly liberated Taloqan has become the crossroads for the end of the war. Relatives and friends run into each other and exchange the traditional greeting of a warm handshake and hug, one hand on the heart.

At the front line, I lie down for a midmorning nap in a hollow covered with straw. Dozens of soldiers loll around me, staring unabashedly. It has long ceased to bother me. Just as I drift off, they begin peppering me with questions. "Are you in the CIA?" asks one hopefully. "Are there women in the CIA?" In the background, there is a sound like the wind rushing through trees and then a series of loud cracks that echo off the mountain ridge behind us. Grinning and pointing to the sky, the soldiers shout, "AMRIKA!"

A soldier offers me the sawed-off base of a rocket-propelled grenade. It is full of tea. I drink it happily, lean back on the straw in the morning sun, and, surrounded by soldiers and lulled by bombs, fall asleep.