Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

Of their bravery, there was no doubt. And within three weeks of the Soviet invasion came the first signs of a unified Muslim political opposition to the Karmal government and its Russian supporters. The few diplomats left in Kabul called them ‘night letters’. Crudely printed on cheap paper, the declarations and manifestos were thrown into embassy compounds and pushed between consular fences during the hours of curfew, their message usually surmounted by a drawing of the Koran. The most recent of them – and it was now mid-January of 1980 – purported to come from the ‘United Muslim Warriors of Afghanistan’ and bore the badge of the Islamic Afghan Front, one of four groups which had been fighting in the south of the country.

From the opened pages of the Koran, there sprouted three rifles. The letter denounced the regime for ‘inhuman crimes’ and condemned Soviet troops in the country for ‘treating Afghans like slaves’. Muslims, it said, ‘will not give up fighting or guerrilla attacks until our last breath … the proud and aggressive troops of the Russian power have no idea of the rights and human dignity of the people of Afghanistan.’ The letter predicted the death of Karmal and three of his cabinet ministers, referring to the president as ‘Khargal’, a play on words in Persian which means ‘thief of work’. The first man to be condemned was Asadullah Sawari, a member of the Afghan praesidium who was Taraki’s secret police chief, widely credited with ordering the torture of thousands of Taraki’s opponents. Others on the death list included Shah Jan Mozdooryar, a former interior minister who was now Karmal’s transport minister.

The ‘night letter’ also included specific allegations that the Soviet army was ‘committing acts which are intolerable to our people’, adding that Russian soldiers had kidnapped women and girls working in a bakery in the Darlaman suburb of Kabul and returned them next morning after keeping them for the night. A similar incident, the letter stated, had occurred in the suburb of Khaire Khana, ‘an act of aggression against the dignity of Muslim families’. When I investigated these claims, bakery workers in Darlaman told me that women workers who normally bake bread for Afghan soldiers had refused to work for Soviet troops and that the Russians had consequently taken the women from the bakery and forced them to bake bread elsewhere. But they were unclear about the treatment the women had received and were too frightened to say more. The authors of the letter said that Muslims would eventually overthrow Karmal and judiciously added that they would then refuse to honour any foreign contracts made with his government. *Then they added, hopelessly and perhaps a little pathetically, that their statements should be broadcast over the BBC at 8.45 p.m. ‘without censorship’.

Still Gavin and I ventured out most days with Steve, Geoff, Mike and the faithful Mr Samadali. We were halfway up the Salang Pass, 130 kilometres north of Kabul, on 12 January when our car skidded on the ice and a young Russian paratrooper from the 105th Airborne Division ran down the road, waving his automatic rifle at us and shouting in Russian. He had been wounded in the right hand and blood was seeping from the bullet-hole through his makeshift bandage and staining the sleeve of his battledress. He was only a teenager, with fair hair and blue eyes and a face that showed fear. He had clearly never before been under fire. Beside us, a Soviet army transport lorry, its rear section blown to pieces by a mine, lay upended in a ditch. There were two tracked armoured carriers just up the road and a Russian paratroop captain ran towards us to join his colleague.

‘Who are you?’ he asked in English. He was dark-haired and tired, dressed in a crumpled tunic, a hammer-and-sickle buckle on his belt. We told him we were correspondents but the younger soldier was too absorbed with the pain from his wound. He re-applied the safety catch on his rifle, then lifted up his hand for our inspection. He raised it with difficulty and pointed to a snow-covered mountain above us where a Russian military helicopter was slowly circling the peak. ‘They shoot Russians,’ he said. He was incredulous. No one knew how many Russians the guerrillas had shot, although a villager a mile further south insisted with undisguised relish that his compatriots had killed hundreds.

But the ambush had been carefully planned. The mine had exploded at the same time as a charge had blown up beneath a bridge on the main highway. So for almost twenty-four hours, half of a Russian convoy en route to Kabul from the Soviet frontier was marooned in the snow at an altitude of more than 7,000 feet. Russian engineers had made temporary repairs and we watched as the Soviet trucks made their way down from the mountains, slithering on the slush and packed ice: 156 tracked armoured vehicles, eight-wheel personnel carriers and 300 lorryloads of petrol, ammunition, food and tents. The drivers looked exhausted. The irony, of course, was that the Russians had built this paved highway through the 11,900-foot pass as a symbol of mutual cooperation between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan – and for the Soviet military convoys that were now streaming south under daily attack. That night, the US State Department claimed that 1,200 Russian soldiers had been killed. It seemed an exaggeration. But the bloody-minded villager may have been right about the hundreds dead. A ‘very limited contingent’, indeed.

Karmal’s government held a ‘day of mourning’ for those killed by ‘the butcher Amin’. The British embassy even lowered its flag to half-mast. But only a few hundred people turned up at the yellow-painted Polekheshti Bridge Mosque to pray for their souls, and they were for the most part well-dressed PDP functionaries. Four young men who arrived at the mosque in northern Kabul and attempted to avoid the signing ceremony were reminded of their party duties by a soldier with a bayonet fixed to his rifle. They signed the book. The rest of Kabul maintained the uneasy tenor of its new life. The bazaars were open as usual and the street sellers with their sweetmeats and oils continued to trade beside the ice-covered Kabul river. In the old city, a Western television crew was stoned by a crowd after being mistaken for Russians.

Kabul had an almost bored air of normality that winter as it sat in its icy basin in the mountains, its wood smoke drifting up into the pale blue sky. The first thing all of us noticed in the sky was an army of kites – large box kites, triangular and rectangular kites and small paper affairs, painted in blues and reds and often illustrated with a large and friendly human eye. No one seemed to know why the Afghans were so obsessed with kites, although there was a poetic quality to the way in which the children – doll-like creatures with narrow Chinese features, swaddled in coats and embroidered capes – watched their kites hanging in the frozen air, those great paper eyes with their long eyelashes floating towards the mountains.

Gavin and I once asked Mr Samadali to take us to the zoo. Inside the gate, a rusting sign marked ‘vultures’ led to some of the nastiest birds on earth, skeletal rather than scrawny. Past the hog-pit, a trek through deep snow brought us to the polar bear cages. But the cage doors were open and the bears were missing. Even more disquieting was the silent group of turbaned men who followed us around the zebra park, apparently under the illusion we were Russians. It must have been the only zoo in the world where the visitors were potentially more dangerous than the animals. We even managed to find Afghanistan’s only railway locomotive, a big early twentieth-century steam engine bought by King Amanullah from a German manufacturer. It sat forlorn and rusting near a ruined palace, its pistons congealed together and guarded by policemen who snatched at our cameras when we tried to take a picture of this old loco – a doubly absurd event since there is not a single railway line in all of Afghanistan.