The empire was already limping when it launched its campaign in , and it was not prepared for such a brutal and costly war. The occupation lacked popular support back home in the USSR. The Afghan army was weak, and the mujahideen was supported through American and Pakistani programs supplying weaponry and finances, strengthening already dedicated fighters.
The Afghans, hardly modernized, were still a formidable force. Not quite united, but not totally uncoordinated, resistance fighters came together just long enough to see the Soviets expelled. The mass murder of civilians in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation was inevitable due to the nature of guerrilla war. Mujahideen fighters blended in well, both to the rural Afghan countryside and the tribal people. Before long, the frustrated Soviets hardly bothered to distinguish between civilians and insurgents, resorting to mass killing campaigns.
The dropping of booby traps from the air, the planting of mines, and the use of chemical substances, though not on a wide scale, were also meant to serve the same purpose.
Retributive murder, as in other instances of war, was commonplace. On one occasion, two hundred noncombatants in the town of Tashqurghan were killed in revenge for the death of three Russian soldiers in April In another instance of violence, the Soviets fired rockets on a wedding ceremony in the village of Ganjabad in As a result of the attacks, roughly people were killed. The brutality of the Soviet effort in Afghanistan displaced millions of people, specifically women and children.
Neighboring Pakistan and Iran absorbed over 5 million refugees, nearly a quarter of the population. Despite demining efforts, to this day, children are often maimed or killed by the mines that remain. The relentless mujahideen persisted until a stalemate finally forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan in But victory was hardly sweet. The results of the war were catastrophic — over a ten-year span:. Afghanistan lost over 1.
The multitude of fractured political insurgency groups in Afghanistan during this time — all vehemently anti-Soviet — shared the common goal of eliminating foreign influence and creating an Islamic state rooted in sharia law. An attempt to create an Afghan coalition government in was unsuccessful, and the country quickly collapsed into a bloody civil war.
Notorious warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his insurgent group Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin were at the forefront of the violence with constant and indiscriminate shelling in Kabul against their fellow Afghans. The conflict in Kabul reached an unprecedented degree of violence as warlords and insurgents fought for control over the capital and terrorized the civilian population through looting, kidnapping, and rape.
Infrastructure, cultural centers, and schools suffered heavy damage as a result of constant rocket fire. Inhabitants were killed or displaced by the thousands, many fleeing for refugee camps in Pakistan where decrepit conditions awaited them. But the regime set up and implemented by the group over the following years brought anything but peace. A new chapter of brutality lay ahead. The emergence of the Taliban can be traced to Pakistani madrassas in which refugee children and Afghan orphans were radicalized.
Women and girls were deprived of education and employment opportunities, required to wear burqas and cover themselves completely, and prohibited from traveling without the accompaniment of a male relative. In addition to the destruction of cultural sites and public executions, the Pashtun Taliban launched a series of deadly attacks on ethnic minorities in Afghanistan.
The grim climate in Afghanistan was compounded by limited access to healthcare and a terrible drought in However, aid agencies and mediating groups were reluctant to get heavily involved.
Hopeful refugees returned from Pakistan and Iran only to leave once more with the realization that an Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban would never be home. The U. Massoud was central to much of the ant-Soviet resistance, and after the troops left, struggled with others to create a new government.
In a few years, Massoud and his forces were fighting the Taliban, and he had become an enemy of Osama bin Laden. On September 9, Massoud was assassinated by two attackers backed by Al Qaeda, just days before the September 11 attacks on the U. An Afghan guerrilla handles a U. The shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missile supplied to the Afghan resistance by the CIA during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is capable of bringing down low-flying planes and helicopters.
At one point, late in the war, rebels were reportedly downing nearly one Soviet aircraft every day with Stinger missiles. Afghan boys orphaned by the war between Kabul's Soviet-backed government and Muslim rebels salute visitors at the Watan 'Homeland' Nursery in Kabul on January 20, Communist political education started young in Kabul schools during the occupation, as part of the government's drive to win the population over.
Aftermath in a village located along the Salang Highway, shelled and destroyed during fights between Mujahideen guerrillas and Afghan soldiers in Salang, Afghanistan. Mujahedeen positioned on rooftops about 10 kilometers from Herat, keeping watch for Russian convoys, on February 15, Soviet soldiers work with two German Shepherd dogs trained to sniff out explosives in and around their base near Kabul on May 1, Wrecked Soviet vehicles are shoved alongside the street in the Panchir Valley village of Omarz in northeast Pakistan in February of Muslim anti-aircraft gunners in eastern Afghanistan's Paktia Province on July 20, Wheels down, a Soviet transport aircraft seems to brush the treetops as it comes in to land at Kabul Airport on February 8, Soviet pilots flying in out of Kabul took defensive measures, including the firing of flares to divert heat-seeking missiles.
A Soviet air force technician empties a bucket of spent flare cartridges at the Kabul airbase on January 23, A Soviet soldier smokes a cigarette at a checkpoint of the Soviet military airport in Kabul on February 10, as the other one forbids pictures. As the planned withdrawal of Soviet troops began, Afghan troops were trained and supplied to take their place. Here, a soldier crawls with his comrades, during a training session in Kabul on February 8, According to officials, the soldiers were from a new unit formed to defend vital installations in the Afghan capital.
Police and armed Afghan militiamen walk amid the debris after a bomb, allegedly placed by the Mujahideen rebels, exploded in downtown Kabul during celebrations marking the 10th anniversary of the Afghan revolution backed by the Soviet Union on April 27, Afghan firefighters carry the body of a young girl killed in a powerful bomb blast that shattered rows of homes and shops in downtown Kabul on May 14, At least eight people were killed and more than 20 injured by the explosion, believed to be planted in a truck on the eve of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Red Army soldiers stand for review on October 19, , in downtown Kabul during a parade, shortly before they returned to the Soviet Union. Afghanistan's president Mohammed Najibullah center smiles as he meets Red Army soldiers on October 19, , in downtown Kabul during a parade. Najibullah who became president in , was later hanged in a street near the UN compound in Kabul on September 27, , where he had sought sanctuary since April when Mujahideen guerrillas entered Afghan capital.
A Red Army soldier and an Afghan army officer pose for the press on October 20, , in downtown Kabul. A Red Army soldier atop of his armored personal vehicle smiles as Soviet Army troops stop in Kabul prior to their withdrawal from Afghanistan, on May 16, A column of Soviet armor and military trucks moves up the highway toward the Soviet border on February 7, in Hayratan.
Fluid alliances complicated power dynamics and prospects for a negotiated settlement among the groups. As Taliban forces spread across Afghanistan, several battles were conducted in major cities, like in Herat February Widespread violence came to a close around , [14] but specific massacres against ethnic minorities extends the period of atrocities into The Taliban offered a brutal version of peace and stability, which could appeal to communities that had been besieged by conflict for decades.
Taliban leaders installed strict sharia law, asking citizens to lay down arms, and conquering them by force when they refused. The best estimate of civilians killed during this time period — is ,, a figure that only represents a rough suggestion of scale, not an accurate accounting of individual lives.
From August — December , a survey was conducted in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan to estimate the number of war dead—inclusive of all causes of death during the war, so not limited to killing.
This amounted to overall war mortality of 1 — 1. His data suggests that the conflict became significantly more lethal under Andropov — , increasing again under Chernenko — There was a slight decrease in fatalities under Gorbachev beginning in before the withdrawal. A paper by Noor Ahmad Khalidi builds on the same data that Sliwinski worked with, but argues that a more accurate estimation requires taking into account the effects of war on the age-sex structure of the Afghan population as well as other patterns of change in internal political borders, migration and questions about the baseline census.
Khalidi posits that a total of , Afghans died as a result of the war, including , males and , females. While it is not possible through this method to separate civilians from combatants, one can guess that the majority of the females, in any case, were civilians. However, we have no capacity to estimate the number killed versus those who died as a result of conditions produced by the conflict. Further, Khalidi cautions against applying the patterns found in refugee camps to the larger population.
We also have some evidence about this period from a handful of journalists, including Ahmed Rashid, who began covering Afghanistan beginning in the s. For instance, he writes that 20, people were killed in Herat in March We note that while our research focuses on the period during the Soviet invasion, atrocities continued thereafter.
However, it is unclear if they again reached the 50, threshold under a new perpetrator. Data about fatalities, whether civilian or combatant, fades in accuracy and coverage during the years of internal conflict. Qualitative studies [23] argue that civilians continued to be killed at high levels in the civil war period, but this number marks a decrease from the Soviet years. What little information exists suggests two potential points of decline in violence against civilians during this period: between — and — Drawing on accounts from journalists and human rights activists allows only a fragmented picture of violence against civilians from the years — Below are a few of the numbers extracted from these reports, with notable contributions by Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who spent time inside Afghanistan during the warlord and Taliban years, and the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan RAWA.
The incidents help us understand the patterns of violence, suggesting that battles were carried out without regard for civilian safety, including ethnic cleansing and replete with targeted killings. Additionally, local soldiers appear to have had few barriers to resort to violence for any reason.
The below is not a comprehensive record of civilian fatalities and cannot be used as such. It is intended to be illustrative. Few reports cover incidents from — RAWA offers some stories of atrocities during this period, but it is only a very small sample, none of which document large-scale massacres.
Maley also reports an extended period of calm from March to October A large portion of the Afghan population suffered some form of displacement.
An article [28] discussing findings of survey conducted amongst Afghans living in Pakistan for the UNDP in January , estimates that over 3 million Afghans fled to Pakistan alone, a number that might have risen to 3. Several factors appear to have contributed to the decline in violence following , key among them the Soviet withdrawal. We code the primary cause of ending as the defeat of perpetrators the USSR by a domestic force with significant outside support.
We also coded to recognize the withdrawal of international forces. Bennett, Andrew.
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