Afghan nomad clashes raise fears of ethnic strife

KAJAB: Bloody raids by nomads armed with machine guns and rocket launchers on villages near Kabul are raising fears about a return to ethnic conflict in Afghanistan 18 months before NATO combat troops leave.

For more than a century, ethnic Pashtuns known as Kuchis have wintered in the south and east where the weather is better, and migrated in the summer to let their herds graze in the cooler north.

But a land dispute between the Kuchis and the settled ethnic Hazaras dating back 130 years has since 2005 disintegrated into seasonal violence in the Kajab valley west of the capital.

With NATO forces due to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014, there are fears that the country could slide back to the chaos seen in the 1990s, when ethnically aligned factions fought a bloody civil war.

From the early 1990s to 2001 fighting between the Pashtun-dominated Taliban and Hazaras led to tens of thousands of deaths, particularly on the Hazara side.