A human rights organisation says two-thousand civilians were killed by Taleban forces in the northern Afghan town of Mazar-i-Sharif, in August.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch called the massacre one of the worst atrocities of Afghanistan's twenty-year civil war.

It says its findings are based on eye-witness accounts of survivors who fled to Pakistan.

They spoke of a killing frenzy in which Taleban soldiers shot anything that moved.

The BBC Kabul correspondent says that the killings by the Taleban were a direct response to their own treatment by opposition forces there a year earlier.

The Taleban has acknowledged that killings occurred, but said they were carried out by rogue forces who would be punished.