Word: mujahedine
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Panjshir Valley in northeast Afghanistan, three horsemen urged their mounts up a rocky defile at a punishing trot. Traders and refugees walking the same path late last month could tell by the men's heavy field jackets and Soviet-made automatic rifles that they were officers of the mujahedin, the Afghan resistance fighters who now control the once fiercely contested valley. Few of the walkers bothered to look carefully at the sparsely bearded, intense face of the lead rider as he passed. Had they done so, they would have recognized a man who has become a legend across Afghanistan...
Ahmad Shah Massoud, 35, a onetime engineering student at the Soviet Polytechnic Institute in Kabul, has spent the past nine years molding the mujahedin in Afghanistan's northeast into what is widely considered the country's most effective guerrilla formation. Last May Massoud's men, who owe allegiance to Jamiat-i-Islami, one of the seven mujahedin parties based across the border in Pakistan, watched in triumph as the last Soviet and Afghan government troops retreated from the Panjshir...
...Soviet Union, negotiating under U.N. auspices, agreed on a ! timetable for withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan. The decision, which will bring all the soldiers home by early 1989, climaxed six years of U.N.-sponsored talks between the Soviet-sponsored Afghan government and Pakistan, chief supporter of Afghanistan's mujahedin rebels...
...Afghanistan, communizing? Gorbachev is withdrawing because he lost the war. Writes Afghan Expert Zalmay Khalilzad in the National Interest: "1986 was the turning point in the Afghan war." What happened? "The most crucial change in this period was the provision of U.S. Stinger ((antiaircraft)) missiles to the mujahedin." To put it bluntly, the Soviets are not leaving Afghanistan because they changed their minds. They are leaving because they lost their air cover. A change of minds followed...
...suspect is the Khad, the Soviet-trained Afghan secret police, which in the past several years has been blamed for hundreds of terrorist bombings in Pakistan. Over the past few months, Kabul and Moscow have issued strident warnings to Islamabad to stop allowing arms for the Afghan rebels, or mujahedin, to be smuggled across the Pakistani border into Afghanistan. Just days before Zia's death, the Kremlin issued a statement saying the Pakistani actions could not "be further tolerated." But many Western diplomats doubt that Moscow would go so far as assassinating Zia, and it is assumed that the Khad...