Armed warlords operating in the hills of eastern Afghanistan have begun ambushing and looting cars and buses as large areas of the country slide back into anarchy.
This has added to concerns about the rule of law and human rights under the nominal Northern Alliance regime, compounded yesterday by the announcement that up to 600 bodies had been found in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.
A spokesman for the Red Cross, Mr Kim Gordon-Bates said in Geneva: "We assume that this is only a portion of the bodies we are collecting in Afghanistan."
He confirmed that Red Cross workers had moved into Taloqan, near the front line around the northern town of Kunduz, and that they would probably be put to work collecting and burying corpses there.
But he was unable to give any estimates of the death toll in the rest of the country.
In addition to the bodies dealt with by the Red Cross, an unknown number of others had probably been buried by family members or military forces, he added. Mr Gordon-Bates said they had so far buried around 300 of the bodies recovered in Mazar - both for hygienic reasons and the right to a dignified burial as laid down in the Geneva conventions on international humanitarian law.
"It's not a job we like, but it's part of our mandate and we've done a lot of it in Afghanistan," said Mr Gordon-Bates.
He said he could not comment on "the cause of death or the nature of the people killed" and he declined to say whether the victims included civilians or how many had been executed.
There have been widespread reports that Northern Alliance troops have singled out non-Afghan allies of the Taliban for reprisals.
The Northern Alliance swept into Mazar last week, in one of the first of its many dramatic victories in reclaiming most of Afghanistan from the Taliban.
Meanwhile, gunmen operating from a deserted hotel in Tangi Abrashim, the Silk Gorge, 60 miles east of Kabul, yesterday held up a van carrying 18 Afghan passengers and stole money and watches.
Four journalists had been murdered in the same area on Monday when six armed men stopped a convoy of cars driving to Kabul. The journalists were led into the surrounding hills, beaten and shot dead. In the past week several other foreign reporters have been robbed on the same unmade road between Jalalabad, which is held by Pashtun commanders, and Kabul, which is held by the Northern Alliance.
One unconfirmed report yesterday by an Iranian news agency said three more journalists had been killed in the area, although there was no evidence to support the claim.
Mr Stephen Evans, a British diplomat who arrived in Kabul this week, said he had held talks about security with Northern Alliance leaders. "Although the security situation is improving, they recommend against travel along the road by expatriates and foreigners for the time being," he said.
Several international aid agencies have this week called for military assistance to ensure the security of their main distribution routes.
Drivers at the Jalalabad bus stand in the capital described how local commanders around the town of Sarobi were holding up cars and robbing passengers. Mr Waqif Khan Shinwari, a driver who reached Kabul last night, said his van was held up by five men armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles at Tangi Abrashim. "Two stood on the roadside and three of them blocked the road," he said. "One of them came in the van and punched me and started hitting the passengers. He was asking for the fare money."
The gunmen, their faces wrapped in scarves, ordered the passengers out of the van and took their money and watches. The women in the group were not touched.
Mr Shinwari said the gunmen were Afghans, spoke Pashtun and Persian and were local commanders.
The area appears to be under the control of Commander Isatullah, a former mujahideen fighter with the despised warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Cdr Hekmatyar was backed by Pakistani intelligence during the war against the Soviets but was reviled for his attacks on Kabul in the early 1990s.
"Before the Taliban came we couldn't travel along this road when it was dark," said Asif, a bus driver. "Now it is the same people who are looting again. Under the Taliban it was much safer. We could travel at night."