Word: kunduz
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Translated, that means Moscow will continue to help the Najibullah < government avoid military defeat. Earlier this month the regime's forces lost two provincial capitals in the northeast: Taliqan, a relatively insignificant small city, and Kunduz, a strategic strong point. Though Afghan troops, supported by Soviet air power, subsequently recaptured Kunduz, Moscow apparently regarded the setbacks as serious enough to quash earlier suggestions that the 50,000 troops still in Afghanistan might be home by the end of the year, well ahead of the Feb. 15, 1989, deadline established under the Geneva accords signed by Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, Pakistan...
According to U.S. intelligence sources, in fact, the regime regained Kunduz only after Soviet fighter-bombers based in the Soviet Union blasted and strafed rebel positions, reducing portions of the city to rubble. Washington considers the sorties a violation of the Geneva accords, as well as a serious threat to the mujahedin's efforts on the battlefield. If the Soviets fear that their Afghan comrades are not tough enough to fend off the mujahedin, Western analysts and rebel leaders have quite the opposite concern: so far, Najibullah's troops have been showing more gumption than expected. Around Jalalabad, a city...
...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 and, in the methodical Soviet...