What concerns the airmen is the age of their Russian-made An-32 aircraft.

"Don't touch this, it would be dangerous," warns air force engineer Mohammad Asif, pointing to a flimsy emergency door handle inside the nearly 30-year-old aircraft before take-off.

"The aircraft we are flying in is old," says Shamsullah, 40, who has spent half his life flying.

The twin-engined An-32 transporter is one of five planes and 10 helicopters belonging to Afghanistan's air force. They have survived the Soviet invasion, civil wars and the US-led bombings which smashed the Taliban in late 2001.

"But they sustained serious damage during the wars and US bombardments," Shamsullah says of the craft.

Some of the planes have recently been repaired in Russia, which improved their safety features, but Shamsullah says flights are still risky as most Afghan airports lack radar and ground-support systems.

"The air fields are full of mines and fragments -- we always carry two spare tyres with us," he says, pointing to the tyres stored in the aisle of the craft.

"There are no assurances of your safety -- this is our job, we have to do it," the captain says.

At the end of the decade-long Soviet invasion, Afghanistan's air force had hundreds of surviving aircraft including helicopters and jet fighters which were divided among the mujahedin warlords who had fought the Russians.

But when the country fell into civil war in 1992, these same warlords used the helicopters and planes to fight each other, destroying most of them as they ruined Afghanistan's infrastructure at the same time.

Downed and rusty aircraft are still scattered all over the country, including Kabul.

"Before the mujahedin took power we had 800 airplanes including jets, choppers and transport planes," deputy air force commander Mohammad Arif told AFP. "Some 400 of them were Su-22 and MiG-21 fighters."

When the outrages of the civil war led to popular support for the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban, the regime seized more than 30 jet fighters and 20 transport aircraft, according to Arif.

This haul included an An-32 in Kabul and aircraft abandoned at Bagram Air Base, just north of the capital, by the Northern Alliance when it was forced out.

Other craft, such as those taken by Shamsullah and like-minded pilots, were used to assist the mujahedin in the fight against the Taliban.

These choppers and planes played an "important role in supplying" ammunition to Northern Alliance fighters on remote front lines, says Shamsullah.

Between 1996 and 2001 when the Taliban were in power "we were supplying ammunitions to (central) Bamiyan, (northern) Badakhshan and other places where we had troops," Shamsullah recalls.

What remained of the air force was then practically all grounded by the US-led offensive against the Taliban for harbouring Osama bin Laden following the September 11 attacks on the United States.

As Afghanistan's fledging national army is being trained and built by a US-led international effort, there are calls for assistance to rebuild the country's air force to its former glory.

A stocktake of the battered force does not take long -- 10 Mi-35 and Mi-17 helicopters; four transport planes, two AN-32s and two AN-26s; and one MIG-21 jet fighter.

One of these AN-32s is in northern Sheberghan, the home town and power base of warlord and former mujahedin General Abdur Rashid Dostam who has repeatedly refused pleas from the Kabul administration to hand over the craft.

With Afghanistan's military air space under the control of the US-led coalition fighting Taliban, Al-Qaeda and other insurgents in the country, calls for a new Afghan air force may be premature.

"We have plans in hand to rebuild Afghanistan's air force," said Defense Ministry spokesman General Mohammed Zahir Azimi.

"At the first step, we plan to buy helicopters, at the second step transport aircraft and later fighters," he said, without specifying the quantities or timelines.

"We are discussing this with the foreign countries which are helping us in this regard as well as with the government and Ministry of Finance to get the budget for this project," he added.

WAR.WIRE