[8] The campaign to capture Mazar-i-Sharif began on October 17, 2001, when the CIA's eight-member Team Alpha landed in the Dari-a-Suf Valley, about 80 miles south of the city, to link up with General Abdul Rashid Dostum.

[11] On November 2, 2001, Green Berets from ODA 543 and three members of the CIA's Team Bravo[12] inserted into the Dari-a-Balkh Valley, after being delayed by weather for several nights.

[13] Dostum led the ethnic-Uzbek-dominated faction of the Northern Alliance, the Junbish-i-Milli Islami Afghanistan, in an attack on the village of Keshendeh southwest of the city on November 4, seizing it with his horse-mounted troops.

[5] Propaganda leaflets were dropped from airplanes, showing a woman being struck by a man and asking if this was how the Afghans wanted to live, and listing the radio frequencies over which Americans would be broadcasting their own version of events.

[14] On November 9, 2001, members of the two ODAs and the CIA teams positioned themselves in mountainside hides and began calling in airstrikes against the Taliban at Tangi Pass - the gateway from the Balkh Valley to the city where the US and Northern Alliance agreed to attack.

The airstrikes took their toll on the Taliban and at a signal Atta and Dostum Northern Alliance forces began their assault by foot, horseback, pickup trucks and some captured BMP armored personnel carriers.

[10] At 2 p.m. Northern Alliance forces, under the command of Dostum and Ustad Atta Mohammed Noor, swept across the Pul-i-Imam Bukhri bridge[10] and seized the city's main military base and the Mazar-e Sharif International Airport.

[16][17] The "ragtag" non-uniformed Northern Alliance forces entered the city from the Balk Valley on "begged, borrowed and confiscated transportation",[21] and met only light resistance.

The group, chiefly consisting of teenage boys,[29] gathered in the Sultan Razia Girls' School, where they began negotiating their surrender, but hundreds of them were ultimately killed.

Officials from the United Nations and other organisations claimed that a massacre by Northern Alliance troops had followed after the defenders surrendered in the school, moments before an American warplane dropped two, or four, 1000-pound bombs.

Later reports suggested instead that the Northern Alliance had shelled the school, rather than an American warplane dropping bombs on it,[6][23][31][32][33] but following the battle, United States Air Force Sgt.

[47] The Pakistani prisoners who were captured fleeing the school were held as "slaves" and often sexually abused by their Northern Alliance captors, who demanded a ransom from their families for their return.

[29] The American-backed forces now controlling the city immediately began broadcasting from Radio Mazar-e-Sharif, the former Taliban Voice of Sharia channel, on 1584 kHz,[48] including an address from former President Burhanuddin Rabbani.

[49] The airfield, the city's main prize for the Americans, had been badly damaged by their bombardment and had been boobytrapped with explosives planted by the Taliban in and around the property as they left.

The former charged that the aerial bombardment had been ill-advised, that the United States had failed to pay sufficient attention to humanitarian concerns and had refused to consult with its allies.

[51] The fall of Mazar-i-Sharif and the events surrounding it were dramatized in the 2018 film 12 Strong, directed by Nicolai Fuglsig and based on the book Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton.