For the first time in five years the dawn call to prayers competed with the sound of music as residents of the Afghan capital, Kabul, awoke to life after the Taliban but with little clue to the shape of a new government. 
Triumphant opposition Northern Alliance fighters walked the streets down which the Taliban fled a day earlier. 
U.S. jets stalked the skies, hunting down bands of fleeing fighters of the fundamentalist militia, allowing them no refuge as they retreated south toward their spiritual capital, Kandahar, or into the heartland of their Pashtun people. 
On day 39 of the U.S. bombing campaign to punish the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born militant remained free in the forbidding and inhospitable mountains of Afghanistan and U.S. special forces also headed south in their hunt. 
His protector, Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, vowed defiance and called on his troops not to desert. 
Defections to the Northern Alliance, composed mainly of minority Uzbeks and Tajiks, by the mainly Pashtun Taliban were believed to have fueled the opposition's lightning race to triumph across the north and west of the country, bringing the fall of the capital after a ground war lasting just four days. 
Such was the speed of the advance that it caught even the alliance's U.S. backers off guard as the motley opposition mujahideen, or holy warriors, swept into Kabul on armored personnel carriers, in trucks and even in taxis with barely a shot fired on Tuesday. 
Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, at his first news conference in Kabul late on Tuesday, said his forces had entered Kabul to maintain security after the unexpected Taliban retreat, despite international appeals for them to wait. 
The United Nations and all groups, except the Taliban, would be invited to Kabul for talks on a future government, he said. 
"There is no place for the Taliban movement in any possible political settlement in Afghanistan," ousted president Burhanuddin Rabbani told Qatar's al-Jazeera television station. 
"God willing, tomorrow I will be in Kabul," he said late on Tuesday. 
The dawn call to prayers on the a day after Kabul's fall, in the pattern of its rapid capture by the Taliban from the same mujahideen in 1996, awoke Kabul residents to uncertainty. 
Factions in the Northern Alliance split the city along ethnic lines within hours of their entry -- a sign Kabul could be reverting to the patchwork divisions that sparked power struggles and civil war when the same groups took over from the Soviet-installed government in 1992. 
Many Kabul residents just seemed pleased to be able to switch their radios to any channel they wanted or to have their beards shaved for the first time in five years to mark the end of the draconian rules of a militia that imposed its interpretation of a 1,300-year-old Islamic Utopia on 20 million Afghans. 
But people were nervous, and pick-up trucks filled with anti-Taliban soldiers armed with Kalashnikov rifles and shoulder-held rocket launchers patrolled the streets. 
"It's okay for now, but people largely don't feel comfortable and reassured about this situation. It may change any day," said one resident as he watched the opposition roll by. 
"It is calm now but may not remain the same probably in the coming days," he said. 
"There was no option for us but to send our security forces into Kabul," Abdullah said, adding the alliance had some 6,000 security forces and troops around the capital. 
He said 8,000 Taliban forces had pulled out of Kabul by about midnight on Monday. 
With Kabul in anti-Taliban hands and the western city of Herat taken, the way was open for an advance on Kandahar. Anti-Taliban tribal leader Hamid Karzai told Reuters by satellite phone the opposition had already taken the airport. 
Opposition leaders said Kandahar could fall within 24 hours as moderate Taliban forces abandoned the hard-liners. 
The Taliban said they had strategically withdrawn from the areas lost. 
They took with them eight Western aid workers -- two Americans, two Australians and four Germans -- facing charges of promoting Christianity. 
The United States said the war was far from over even as the difficult task of settling the political peace began in Kabul. 
Washington had appealed to the alliance not to enter Kabul. 
The alliance is unpopular in the capital where residents remember the power struggles among opposition leaders in the 1990s that unleashed almost daily rocket attacks on the city and killed about 50,000 residents. 
"If Kabul is demilitarized that will be good," said one young man. 
Asked about the formation of a future Afghan government, Abdullah said the alliance invited the United Nations and all Afghan groups to send representatives to Kabul for talks. 
"Taliban excluded," he said. 
The United States had wanted a broad agreement on the structure of any post-Taliban government before the alliance entered Kabul. Neighboring Pakistan wants a role for what it calls moderate Taliban. 
There have been few signs of progress on a deal. The United Nations wants an urgent meeting of Afghan leaders. 
In Rome, a senior adviser to Afghanistan's exiled former king, Zahir Shah, seen as a key player in the political future, said the Northern Alliance had broken an agreement with the monarch by entering Kabul. 
"He (Zahir Shah) can return to Afghanistan but only as an ordinary citizen," the ousted Rabbani told al-Jazeera television.