Among the public, solidarity with the Tajik-speakers of northern Afghanistan mostly outweighs any Islamist sentiment.
For them, Kabul, with its large Persian-speaking Tajik and Hazara community, comes as a culture shock.
The most senior is an ethnic Tajik with close links to Herat's former Tajik warlord-ruler, Ismail Khan.
Amanullah Khan has accused Ismail Khan, an ethnic Tajik, of denying roles to Pushtuns in his regional government.
Although a Pashtun, he had been a member in the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance.
Many Tajik migrants were rounded up in Moscow after the initial guilty ruling.
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In its strongly worded statement, the Tajik embassy in Moscow accused the Uzbek authorities of deliberately creating the blockade.
The Tajik president, Imamali Rakhmonov, called an emergency meeting after the fall of Mazar to discuss events to the south.
Kamgar, a 50-year-old ethnic Tajik, is a stocky man and an animated talker who sometimes flicks back a lock of hair.
Khan, an ethnic Tajik, is a former deputy to Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of Jamiat-e-Islami, who was killed in 2001.
Some Central Asian states, such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, have joined Afghanistan's proxy war by backing the Uzbek and Tajik factions.
The Tajik government said it moved its forces into Khorog, which sits on the Afghan border, in order to detain Mr. Ayombekov.
He was one of the few influential Pushtuns in the Tajik-led alliance.
Three senior jobs will be taken by prominent Tajiks associated with the legendary Tajik commander, Ahmad Shah Masood, who was killed in September.
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Only Mr Rabbani, an icon of the Northern Alliance, stayed inside Mr Karzai's tent, with a thuggish vice-president, Mohammad Qasim Fahim, another Tajik.
They fly on seven different sets of papers that make moving through every border, be it Jordanian, Israeli or Tajik, a tough task.
But, according to the Tajik news agency Asia-Plus, the alliance has admitted losing control of a key district in the north to the Taleban.
The Tajik effort aims to create smaller-scale, lower-carbon centers and then to build these centers alongside schools, hospitals, and small to mid sized farms.
Karzai is a Pashtun, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, while his top opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, is half Pashtun and half Tajik, the second-largest ethnic group.
Pentagon experts are currently looking at a Tajik military airfield, although so far there is nothing to compare with the intense involvement in Uzbekistan.
Most residents of the province belong to the Pamiri ethnicity, which follows the minority Ismaili sect of Islam and speaks languages distinct from Tajik.
The government accused Mr. Ayombekov, a Gorno-Badakhshan native, of assassinating days earlier a general commanding the provincial branch of the Tajik state security service.
Mr Karimov thinks the Islamist threat is so serious that in May he signed a pact with the Russian and Tajik presidents to counter fundamentalism.
Dr Abdullah - a Tajik-Pashtun former eye surgeon and ex-foreign minister - was adjudged in the end to have won nearly a third of valid votes cast.
You will need a return Tajik visa, a letter from a western organisation accrediting you, and a Tajik government pass (obtainable from the Tajik ministry of foreign affairs).
His body was found days later dumped in the vicinity of a Tajik army base near the city, he said, adding that details are sketchy because of the continuing blackout.
The Northern Alliance, and in particular the Tajik-dominated Jamiat-i-Islami faction, which controls Kabul, has little apparent reason to go along with a process that is likely to dilute its power.
During the Bonn negotiations that led to the creation of the six-month interim administration in December, he walked out to protest against what he saw as a Tajik hijacking of power.
The attack on the Special Forces came in a region of Afghanistan where forces loyal to ethnic Pashtun commander Ammanullah Khan and Ismail Khan, the Tajik governor of Herat have been battling for supremacy.
The meeting also highlighted the enormous power of the faction leaders from the mainly Tajik former Northern Alliance, who orchestrated both Mr Karzai's election and the selection of his government from behind the scenes.
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