IN the late fourteenth century the mighty Tartar warrior Tamerlane led his Uzbek horsemen into Afghanistan. They did the kind of nasty things invaders tend to

do when they get half a chance; they looted palaces, pillaged towns, and slaughtered pretty much anyone who stood in their way.

Within an indecently short time they had the country well and truly conquered. The rascals enjoyed the experience so much that, after a brief pause to catch their breath, they saddled up and just went on conquering. Tamerlane and his ruthless army swept through Asia and beyond, creating a vast empire that for 150 years controlled all the land between Baghdad and the western edge of China.

Cut to 2001. Enter Uzbeki warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a key player in the current Afghan conflict and a man who regards himself as something of a modern-day Tamerlane. It has been almost 500 years since the real Tamerlane's empire went pear-shaped, bringing to an end Uzbekistan influence within the region. Now some observers believe that, despite his protestations to the contrary, General Dostum might be planning to restore it, emerging from the current chaos as Afghanistan's new leader.

Heaven forfend.

Certainly, the Northern Alliance warlord appeared to be trying to soften his public image earlier this week. Hitherto renowned as a bloody and merciless fighter (one of his favourite tricks is to tie his captured enemies to a tank and crush them to a pulp under the steel tread), he was showing worrying signs of reaching something of an epiphany.

''I'm sick of death,'' he declared during an interview with a representative from the Daily Telegraph (though, for some reason, Dostum thought he was from the Al Jazeera TV channel).

Now he was ready to work for a

stable and prosperous future, he said. He wanted to bring water, gas, and electricity to his people. He wanted to build schools.

Dostum was speaking from his headquarters, the medieval Qalai-Jhangi fortress (''the fort of war''), near Mazar-e-Sharif where 700 prisoners, most of them non-Afghan Taliban captured in the fall of Kunduz, had just staged a three-day rebellion.

With merciless efficiency, Dostum's men crushed the uprising, killing hundreds. On Thursday, with the fortress still piled high with rotting corpses, gunfire briefly erupted yet again. One local Red Cross worker was feared dead and another two wounded by Taliban prisoners who, having survived the battle, were believed to have been hiding under the bodies of their fallen comrades.

Amnesty International, suspecting that a full-blown massacre may have taken place, has demanded an inquiry. Despite claims that many of the dead had their hands tied, Dostum strenuously denies allegations that atrocities were committed by his troops. He insists that they treated the prisoners humanely prior to the rebellion. Well he would claim that, wouldn't he? Especially if he now wants to be regarded as a peace-seeking missile.

Still, it shows that, in terms of infamy at least, Dostum is not in the same league as the historic figure he seeks to emulate. At the Battle of Panipat in 1398, Tamerlane is reputed to have put no fewer than 100,000 Indian soldiers to the sword. General Dostum stands accused of merely slaying a few hundred.

Given the bloody backdrop to this week's events, it is a tad naive to take the general's ''sick-of-war'' declaration seriously. Like many of the protagonists in the Afghan tragedy, he is cunning and treacherous. Words come easy to this kind. The chances of him turning his sword into a ploughshare in the foreseeable future seem remote.

Throughout his extraordinarily violent career he has been a serial side-switcher; a man who has never been short of a coat to turn. In his world of double cross and double dealing, you survive by checking which way the wind's blowing. Then you act accordingly.

And yet, even with his formidable

talent for duplicity, Dostum is lucky to be alive. Indeed, during the current

conflict he has been reported killed no fewer than five times. ''It was always because my satellite phone was switched off and no-one could reach me, so you reported me dead,'' he explained to the Telegraph man.

The beefy, 6ft Dostum, who favours the camouflage uniform of a Soviet officer, has narrow eyes and a trademark moustache which looks like the bristles on a shoe brush. Most pictures show him as being beardless (unusual for Afghan males) though the most recent photographs suggest that he has recently cultivated more than just a five o'clock shadow.

Little is recorded of his early life, save for the fact that he was a time-served plumber. During the years of Soviet domination he was a communist union boss on an Afghan gas field built by the Russians. By the mid-1980s he was in command of a 20,000-strong, mostly ethnic Uzbeki, militia which controlled the northern provinces of the country and sided with the Soviet occupying forces in their war with the Mujahedeen guerrillas.

When in 1989 the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan with its tail between its legs, Dostum's jacket looked to be on a decidedly shaky peg. He went on to join the puppet government of President Najibullah but in 1992, as the Muslim guerrillas besieged Kabul, he saw the writing on the wall and promptly switched sides.

Then, after joining the first government set up by the victorious anti-Soviet forces, he about-turned yet again, ordering his army to shell the capital for months and killing thousands in the process. When that failed to achieve his strategic aims he retreated north,

basing himself in Mazar-e-Sharif and consolidating his grip on the surrounding area which covers six provinces

and has a mainly-Uzbeki population of five million.

In 1997, when he was at the height of his power, the then 43-year-old controlled what was effectively the mini-state of northern Afghanistan. His subjects were so impressed by his rule that they bestowed upon him the informal title of pasha, an honour traditionally used for royalty.

While much of the rest of the country lay in ruins, Mazar was thriving. Its bazaars were packed with imported luxury goods. It had its own university, bankrolled by Dostum, which had a

significant number of female students. Women worked in the local civil service, and as teachers and doctors.

The hard-drinking Dostum grew rich, some say on the back of smuggling and drug exports. He drove around in an armoured-plated Cadillac. He started up his own airline, Balkh Air, with two British-made jets which flew to destinations in Central Asia and the Middle East.

Then came the Taliban. Though he was privately dismissive of them (telling his aides that he had no intention of submitting to a government under which ''there will be no music and no whisky''), he hoped at first to resist the Islamic fundamentalists who had over-run most of the country south of the Hindu Kush. He believed that he could reach some kind of accommodation with them. And, for a brief period at least, Mazar-e-Sharif remained an oasis of secular life, beyond the clutches of the religious fanatics.

Some reports suggest that Dostum turned against the Taliban when he saw his old mucker, ex-President Najibullah, castrated and hanged from the

barrel of a tank in Kabul. Whatever the case, events were taken out of the warlord's hands when he was betrayed by a group of his commanders in 1997. As Dostum and his family fled to safety in neighbouring Uzbekistan, his treacherous colleagues invited the black-

turbaned Taliban fighters into Mazar in the hope that they could come to some form of power-sharing arrangement.

Such was the depth of hatred against the Taliban, however, that the city rose up in bloody revolt. Some estimates suggest that as many as 1000 Taliban fighters were massacred. Other reports claim that many more were killed when, after capture, they were packed into steel shipping containers and left to suffocate in the heat of the desert sun.

Dostum returned to his former fiefdom in Mazar and promptly arranged the execution of the commander who had betrayed him by attempting to strike a deal with the Taliban. Then, in 1998, the Taliban staged a counter-attack and the city was once again firmly in their grip. With the express approval of their leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar,

the Taliban took their revenge on the people of Mazar-e-Sharif. In a two-day orgy of violence, thousands of them swept through the city, committing atrocities and murdering thousands.

The general was forced to flee once again; this time to Turkey. He returned to Afghanistan earlier this year and reached a compromise agreement with his former arch rival Ahmed Shah Massoud. The pair agreed to combine forces to fight the Taliban under the Northern Alliance banner.

Then, two days before the September 11 attacks, Massoud was assassinated by suicide bombers. Dostum might well have expected to take overall command of the Alliance forces.

However, the appointment went instead to one of Massoud's closest aides, General Fahim. Reluctantly,

Dostum agreed to the arrangement, pledged allegiance to President Rabbani's government-in-exile, and then went on to become America's big pal in the ensuing war.

Now firmly back in control of his old manor, it seems that he ain't gonna study war no more. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he's planning to return home and resume his earlier career as a jobbing plumber. Though he claimed in that interview earlier this week that he would play no formal role in running the country, he warned that no government of Afghanistan could be formed without his consent.

''I want my people in the next government,'' he declared, ominously pointing out that he had 6000 Taliban prisoners under his protection. Given this week's events in his fortress, ''protection'' is possibly the wrong word. The terms ''hostages'' and ''bargaining chips'' might have been more appropriate.