Long after Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1979, the country remained mired in violent upheaval. Many Afghans who oppose the fundamentalist Islamic regime of the Taliban, which took power in 1996, support the Northern Alliance party, which grew out of the Mujahedeen. The official head of the Northern Alliance is the ousted president Burhanuddin Rabbani, who claims to be the head of the Government and controls most of the country’s embassies abroad and retains Afghanistan’s UN seat after the U.N. But others say the Northern Alliance, which is the main oppositionparty to the Taliban, is also responsible for gross human rights abuses and corruption. The Afghan Northern Alliance follow a milder form of Islam than the Taliban. The group is made up of an ethnically and religiously disparate group of rebel movements, mainly non-Pashtun ethnic groups. Pashtuns are the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan.