Word: panjshir
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Buffeted by a chilling wind that funneled down the gorges of the 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...
...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...
Barikot lies in a strategic valley in the mountains of Kunar province where two rivers, the Nuristan and the Chitral, meet to form the Kunar. Nearby are several important mujahedin supply routes, leading from the Pakistan border to Nuristan, the Panjshir valley and northern Afghanistan. Last summer, when Barikot was in danger of falling, the Soviets mounted one of their biggest operations of the war in order to save it. Supported by scores of MiGs and other jets, and Mi-24 helicopters, some 10,000 troops managed to fight their way through to Barikot, but after a few days...
...Soviet army's seventh and most punishing assault on Afghanistan's Panjshir Valley this spring was in many respects an exercise in frustration. Moscow was determined to bring down Ahmad Shah Massoud, 30, a resourceful leader of the mujahedin, who have been defying the Soviets ever since they invaded the country in 1979. But only five days before the beginning of the Soviet operation, code-named Goodbye Massoud, the mujahedin commander suddenly slipped away from his headquarters and went into hiding. The following week the Soviets claimed Massoud was dead. Within hours, the rebel leader's voice...
...mujahedin opened the boxes and carefully packed each mine in a mixture of camel dung, mud and straw-the mate rials that local peasants use to build walls. Finally, more than two weeks later, ponies piled high with the booty arrived at Massoud's base in the Panjshir Valley. Says a senior Western diplomat in the region: "Considering that we are living in the age of computers and the Concorde, the means of getting help to the mujahedin are extremely primitive...