Word: afghanization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mujahedin in Afghanistan's northeast into what is widely considered the country's most effective guerrilla formation. Last May Massoud's men, who owe allegiance to Jamiat-i-Islami, one of the seven mujahedin parties based across the border in Pakistan, watched in triumph as the last Soviet and Afghan government troops retreated from the Panjshir...
...forces should get some breathing space because of approaching winter and their recent battlefield successes. The Soviet-Afghan retreat from the valley was triggered when the rebels overran a government stronghold at Tambana last May. Then in August and September, Jamiat fighters expanded their control by sweeping through the northeastern cities of Khanabad, Taliqan, Keshem and most of Kunduz, the provincial capital. That leaves only one town, Faizabad, in government hands in the northeast...
...Private Mohammad Beg, a Soviet soldier stationed in an isolated outpost north of Kabul, the odyssey to confinement and conversion began with a dispute with one of his superiors in 1987. After beating the officer unconscious, the 21-year-old Uzbek from Tashkent deserted, and before long, Afghan villagers handed him over to the mujahedin...
Sergeant Viktor Nazaro, 23, a Ukrainian from Uzhdano, was captured by the Afghan insurgents while serving with a reconnaissance unit in the northern town of Kunduz in 1984. Private Leonid Vilko, 24, a Moldavian stationed at Bagram air base north of Kabul, was taken prisoner the same year while trying to defect to the West...
...final status of the POWs is far from certain. They could become pawns in a postwar tussle between Moscow and the mujahedin, who are insisting that the Soviet Union pay war reparations to a future Afghan government. Negotiations over the POWs will be further complicated by the task of separating those who decide to return to the U.S.S.R. from those who do not. Until then, most of the POWs are doomed to remain strangers in a strange land, trusted by hardly anyone. "To all appearances, they are Muslims and pray with us," says , Mohammad Payendah, an administrative officer...