Word: herat
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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...
...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...
...bitterness of the civil war was illustrated last March by violent riots in Herat, where Muslim peasants and 2,000 defecting Kabul troops went on a bloody rampage, killing hundreds of Khalq officials, army soldiers and foreigners, including at least 20 Soviet advisers and their families. Kabul responded with an all-out attack by helicopter gunships and jets, leaving some 20,000 Afghans dead in the streets. Though it crushed the riot, the massive retaliation reinforced the tribesmen's conviction that the Khalq regime is an atheistic puppet of the Soviet Union. Said one unrepentant factory business manager...