Word: dobanday
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...clinics; they farm by night, when no MiGs or helicopter gunships fly overhead; they use homemade weapons and their knowledge of the difficult terrain to foil the relentless ground attacks of the Soviets. Robert Schultheis, an American freelance writer, spent ten weeks with the men who went back to Dobanday, a once prosperous village that was leveled by the Soviets in 1978. His report...
...story of Dobanday is typical. Just six years ago, 20,000 people lived in spacious adobe houses scattered across the floor of a green, spring-fed canyon some 45 miles south of Kabul. "Life was good," recalls Haji Jumah Gul. "We had wheat, corn, rice, melons, apples, cherries, pears and mulberries. Almost everyone had cattle and sheep." Many of the villagers were prosperous enough to be able to afford a pilgrimage each year to Mecca...
...Taraki, a Soviet-supported Marxist, seized power in Kabul. It would be 20 months before Moscow would send the first of some 100,000 troops to occupy the country, but Soviet advisers were already leading the Afghan army in search-and-destroy missions across the countryside. The residents of Dobanday first became alarmed when they heard that the new regime was attacking religious leaders and traditions. The authorities then arrested two local elders and decreed that all houses in the settlement be thrown open for inspection...
...British .303 rifles and a few muskets that had last seen use in battles against the raj. But they fought with spirited tenacity. As one patriarch remembers, "We sang songs as we fought the Communists." They demolished the government military post at nearby Khoshi and barricaded the road into Dobanday. For eight months they fought a series of bloody battles, resisting the force of gunships and armored convoys with captured machine guns, homemade grenades and Molotov cocktails...
...people of Dobanday quickly discovered that their attackers did not make war by the gentlemanly rules favored by their imperial predecessors. "My uncle fought the British on the border after his father was killed by them in battle," recalls Haji Khan, a rheumy-eyed septuagenarian. "But the British did not kill old people, children and women; they would not aim their artillery at innocent people." The Communists, by contrast, massacred civilians. Worst of all, when government troops finally broke through to Dobanday, a Soviet adviser marched into the central mosque, tore up the Koran and put a torch...
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