Word: herat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Amid these indications of increasingly ruthless conflict, TIME Correspondent Marcia Gauger crossed the country last week. Traveling by public bus with Tyler Marshall of the Los Angeles Times, she journeyed hi six days from Spinbaldak on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the city of Herat in the far west. Her report...
...caught a bus for Herat early the following morning. The passing desert landscape yielded camel's thorn, patches of purple and pale yellow flowers, and 28 charred metal wrecks-military trucks, armored personnel carriers and, to our horror, a bus. Again came the whisper: "Mujahidin. "After a Soviet guard waved us through one checkpoint, my relieved traveling companion grinned and gave the soldier a little farewell wave in return. This upset one of the Afghans, who fixed Marshall with a scowl-evidently taking him for a Soviet sympathizer-and ran his finger across his throat. Then, just as Marshall...
...units, one stationed due east at Jalalabad and one due west at Shindand. One of the four armored divisions, equipped with heavy T-72 tanks and BMP and BMD armored personnel carriers, was also dug in near Kabul; the three others were fanned out at Kandahar in the south, Herat in the northwest and Kunduz in the northeast. American intelligence experts were puzzled by one facet of the Soviet deployment: each division had a full complement of chemical-biological-radiological warfare decontamination units. The most plausible explanation seemed to be that the decontamination units were regularly assigned to the divisions...
...routed a Soviet column in Bamian province northwest of Kabul. Fighting was said to be taking place in Logar province south of the capital, in Badakhshan and Takhar along the northeast frontier with the Soviet Union, in the southern city of Kandahar and in the desert wastes west of Herat and Farah. Concluded a Western observer: "The Soviet plan seems to be to secure the capital and seal the borders. If escape routes to Iran and Pakistan are cut, I am sure they are confident that eventually they will prevail over the insurgents through superior force of arms...
...Taraki and the Soviets, however, there were already rumblings of revolt among conservative Muslim tribesmen unhappy at the prospect of radical social and economic reforms. As the Marxists in Kabul pressed their case, the opposition gradually developed into a full-scale religious insurgency. In March, thousands of Afghans in Herat (pop. 150,000), a provincial capital 400 miles west of Kabul, rose in a revolt that lasted for several days. An estimated 20,000 civilians lost their lives; so did at least 20 Soviet advisers and their families in a series of brutal rebel attacks...