Word: kandahar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Then the question will be when, not if, the Soviet-backed regime of President Najibullah will fall. Though all the country's major cities are still under government control, Kandahar and Jalalabad, two of the five largest, have seen their defenses crumble under mujahedin attacks. Moscow insists it is determined to ensure the survival of Najibullah's government, but nearly all diplomats in Kabul believe the regime will collapse within months, perhaps even weeks, of Feb. 15. As the prospect of a bloody siege grew last week, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker ordered the closing of the American embassy...
...guerrillas learned that lesson the hard way at Kandahar last week when insurgents of Jamiat-i-Islami broke off attacks on strategic high ground around Baba Wali, a heavily fortified point overlooking the city, after coming under air and artillery barrages from entrenched government forces. An assault by fighters of Yunis Khalis' Hezb-e-Islami last month on outposts screening Jalalabad was similarly thrown back at the cost of as many as 50 mujahedin lives. Such large-scale attacks under heavy fire are something new for the guerrilla forces. Says Abdul Qadir, a senior rebel commander with Khalis: "The mujahedin...
Moscow and Kabul's answer to the emerging rebel strategy of slow strangulation is to dig in at a few strongholds -- Kabul, Jalalabad, Herat, Faizabad, Ghazni, Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif -- and await a change in the military or political equation that could give them an advantage. Most of the remaining 50,000 Soviet troops are garrisoned in Kabul and Shindand, the huge air base in western Afghanistan, as well as in Herat and a few other cities along the main roads to the Soviet border. As many as 100,000 Afghan troops - are deployed in the same areas...
...Afghan rebels, Soviet-led squads now retaliate by burning villages, fields and orchards and sometimes by executing the male inhabitants of nearby villages. Last July Soviet forces shot as many as 30 elders in the provincial capital of Ghazni. In October, after a series of raids on convoys outside Kandahar, the Soviets left some 100 civilians dead in nearby settlements. At times over the past year, they have mounted aerial and artillery attacks on Istalif, Herat and other cities, but without destroying the rebels' resiliency. Soon after the Soviet and Afghan government forces announced last August that they...
...region. Their objective, presumably, was to obliterate guerrilla strength around the crucial 50-mile stretch of highway leading from Kabul toward the Soviet border, along which the invaders transport their supplies. Meantime, according to Western intelligence reports, Soviet bombers were attacking targets near Herat in the west and around Kandahar in the south. They apparently hope that by demolishing villages they can devastate local agriculture and drive the residents from areas that might otherwise lend support to the insurgents. As Abdul Haq, a guerrilla commander interviewed in Pakistan, points out, "Every kind of supply for the mujahedin [warriors] comes from...