Taliban guards at at Kabul International Airport taking a morning tea break. Just a few days after their forces captured the Afghan capital, the Taliban have made drastic changes in the lives of the people there. (Agence France-Presse)

KABUL, Afghanistan -- In the four days since Kabul fell to Taliban militias, the capital's one million people have been plunged into the medieval labyrinth that is Taliban rule.

Already, a secretive, six-man ruling council of Islamic clerics has reshaped the everyday lives of ordinary Afghans who, at least in Kabul, long enjoyed one of the most liberal lifestyles of any Muslim community in Central Asia. Cinemas have been closed, the Kabul television station shut down, and the playing of all music has been banned.

A decree on Sunday from the new Department for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prohibition of Vice ordered all men in government jobs to grow "proper beards" -- meaning untrimmed ones -- within 45 days. Western-style suits have been banned.

Women and girls have fared worse. Girls' schools have been closed while the clerics, known as mullahs, study the "issue" of education for females. Women with jobs have been told to stay at home, and ordered, when venturing out, to wear a full "chaderi," a gown that covers a woman from head to toe, allowing her to see only through a tightly-woven facemask.

On Sunday, there were several instances reported in which Taliban fighters stopped women on Kabul streets and beat them, in one instance with a radio antenna ripped from a car, accusing them of not covering their entire bodies.

The mullahs, who have already imposed changes on the parts of the country that have been under Taliban control, are introducing the capital to sharia, the harsh Islamic criminal code that prescribes stoning to death for adulterers and drug traffickers, amputations of hands and feet for thieves, and flogging for the sale or consumption of liquor. At least one man has already been paraded through the city on a truck, his face blackened, a weight attached to his lower jaw to keep his mouth open, and his left hand severed.

Still, the Taliban capture of the capital, after a 22-month siege, has brought a breath of relief to the people in Kabul. Before the dust storms blew up Monday, shrouding the city in a fine brown haze, the morning sunlight showed the capital in a rare state, with residents moving about without fear of the long-range artillery that has killed at least 30,000 people and reduced much of the city to rubble.

And the voice of the city is changing, too, with people talking about the possibility of an end to the seemingly eternal civil war all across Afghanistan, something many Afghans have long said they would sacrifice almost anything to achieve.

The war began when the Afghan Communist underground seized power in Kabul in a coup in April 1978. In 1979, Soviet paratroops seized Kabul airport to begin a decade-long military occupation. When they pulled out, Najibullah, the Soviet-backed Afghan leader, retained power until 1992. Since, then he had been sheltered in a U.N. compound in Kabul.

After the collapse of Communist rule in 1992, a jumble of guerrilla factions jostled for control of Afghanistan. Burhanuddin Rabbani, one of the faction leaders, became president in the government's most recent incarnation. The Islamic groups that succeeded Najibullah, have been picked off one by one by the Taliban, a movement that sprung out of Islamic religious schools called madrassahs in 1994. The Taliban's pledge was to rid the country of the anarchy fostered by the guerrilla factions.

With their victory at Kabul, the Taliban now control 70 per cent of the country and are fast closing in on the northern 30 per cent that remains under the control of two surviving ethnic militias.

Throughout the day Monday, Taliban fighters in Japanese pick-up trucks were said to be pouring north toward the Salang Tunnel, a Soviet-built feature high in the Hindu Kush mountains that is the last major barrier facing the Taliban before they confront the militias of Gen. Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek, and Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Tajik, who was the military commander in the Kabul government that the Taliban ousted in the offensive that culminated last week.

Dostum, a former communist commander, was reported to have rushed 2,000 troops to the northern end of the tunnel to stage a last-ditch battle for survival.

He is said to fear the same fate as Najibullah.

On Thursday night, fleeing officials of the ousted Rabbani government offered to take Najibullah with them, but he declined, apparently believing the Taliban would not breach the U.N. compound. Taliban fighters dragged Najibullah from the compound at 1.30 a.m. on Friday, and had killed him by 4.30 a.m., U.N. officials said. He had been tortured and shot and his mangled corpse was left hanging alongside his brother's.

It will be a long time before most people in Kabul can think of the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist militia force that captured Kabul last week, without jarring recollections of the bloody way in which the fundamentalists introduced themselves to this war-shattered capital.

"Najibullah was a bad Afghan, and a very cruel man," said one man who was once a prisoner of the communist secret police. "But what the Taliban did to him was quite horrible, and now we must think about the kind of people they must be to do such a brutal thing. Maybe our lives now will be even more difficult than before."

All across Kabul Monday, people lowered their voices when asked about the fate of Najibullah, who was as brutal a ruler as this harsh country has known, but who won grudging respect from many Afghans for his peaceful surrender to the council of former Muslim guerrilla leaders in 1992.

The stillness that came with the end of the fighting in the capital was compounded by an eery emptiness in many streets, partly the result of most women staying home and partly the consequence of a mass exodus to the north, said to have involved as many as 250,000 people, ahead of the Taliban's march into the city.

Traffic moving southwards across the arid plain that separates Kabul from the Hindu Kush suggested the exodus was reversing, but many shops remained shuttered.

One of the few busy spots was at the gates to the Arg Palace, once home to Afghan kings and, since Thursday, headquarters of the Taliban. Hundreds of heavily-beaded Taliban fighters carrying Kalashnikov rifles milled about, many of them southerners from the city of Kandahar, the original base for the Taliban. Kabul people who dare to talk about the Taliban often say that the new rulers' harsh brand of Islam is a product of the walled-off mentality which, these people say, has been characteristic for centuries of Kandahar.

Arabic lettering on the white Taliban flag fluttering atop the palace's clock tower spelled out the Taliban message. "There is no God but Allah," it said, in the most sacred words of the Koran.

Another message came from the Soviet-built tank lurking behind the gates, its barrel festooned with paper flowers. Beggars who are one of the legacies of the war, many of them men missing legs, moved among the Taliban fighters, some distinguishable by white turbans of the kind favored by the ruling mullahs.

After two decades, many people appeared to have decided that there is no choice but to go along with the mullahs, while reserving judgment on what their rule will bring. In the bazaar that crowds along the banks of the Kabul River in the heart of the city, Abdul Jabbar, an 85-year-old pensioner who practiced law under the Afghan monarchy, approached a foreigner to practice what he said was English grown rusty during years of war.

Jabbar, wearing a freshly purchased prayer cap in Taliban white, chose his words carefully. "We are perhaps a little happy that the Taliban have come, because the fighting is ended," he said. "But in future, we can only be happy if the Taliban do their work well. Everything is in the hands of Allah."