The Soviet War in Afghanistan, 1979 - 1989

 


The Soviet War in Afghanistan, 1979 - 1989

Nearly twenty-five years ago, the Soviet Union pulled its last troops out of Afghanistan, ending more than nine years of direct involvement and occupation. The USSR entered neighboring Afghanistan in 1979, attempting to shore up the newly-established pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. In short order, nearly 100,000 Soviet soldiers took control of major cities and highways. Rebellion was swift and broad, and the Soviets dealt harshly with the Mujahideen rebels and those who supported them, leveling entire villages to deny safe havens to their enemy. Foreign support propped up the diverse group of rebels, pouring in from Iran, Pakistan, China, and the United States. In the brutal nine-year conflict, an estimated one million civilians were killed, as well as 90,000 Mujahideen fighters, 18,000 Afghan troops, and 14,500 Soviet soldiers. Civil war raged after the withdrawal, setting the stage for the Taliban's takeover of the country in 1996. As NATO troops move toward their final withdrawal this year, Afghans worry about what will come next, and Russian involvement in neighboring Ukraine's rebellion has the world's attention, it is worth looking back at the Soviet-Afghan conflict that ended a quarter-century ago. Today's entry is part of the ongoing series here on Afghanistan.

1 A low-flying Afghan helicopter gunship in snow-capped valley along Salang highway provides cover for a Soviet convoy sending food and fuel to Kabul, Afghanistan, on January 30, 1989. The convoy was attacked by Mujahideen guerrillas with rockets further up the highway, with Afghan government troops returning fire with artillery


2 Russian-built Afghan MIG-17 jet fighters lined up at an airport in Kandahar, southwestern Afghanistan, on February 5, 1980.


3 Soviet soldiers direct tank traffic outside Kabul on January 7, 1980. Tank units had set up positions all around the capital city


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thirty-two frightening snapshots of a hanging. And no one knew who the victims were – until now.

Image
An unknown photographer captured the hanging of Ferenc Szalasi, known as the “Hungarian Hitler.” He and three others were executed on March 12, 1946. Thirty-two frightening snapshots of a hanging. And no one knew who the victims were – until now. The 32 black-and-white snapshots were like frames from a disturbing home movie —  four men marched to the gallows and hanged one by one. There’s a large crowd of onlookers present. Many are in military uniforms. Two priests accompany the condemned and raise crucifixes for them to kiss moments before execution. The scene is the stone courtyard of a big brick building where people are looking out glass-less windows and thronging the rooftop. Many bystanders have cameras. In one picture, a doctor with a stethoscope checks a victim for a heartbeat after he’s been hanged. When my colleague, copy editor Panfilo Garcia, brought the pictures to me and the Retropolis desk, he wondered whether anyone would like them as a donatio...
Read more

Japanese war crimes – Unit 731, Cannibalism, torture, chemical weapons, murdering of PoWs and civilians and other atrocities

Image
  Japanese war crimes – Unit 731, Cannibalism, torture, chemical weapons, murdering of PoWs and civilians and other atrocities Japanese war crimes occurred in many Asian and Pacific countries during the period of Japanese imperialism, primarily during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. These incidents have also been described as an Asian Holocaust and Japanese war atrocities. R. J. Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, estimates that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered from nearly 3 to over 10 million people, most likely 6 million Chinese, Koreans, Malaysians, Indonesians, Filipinos and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. According to Rummel, “This democide [i.e., death by government] was due to a morally bankrupt political and military strategy, military expediency and custom, and national culture.” According to Rummel, in China alone, during 1937–45, approximately 3.9 million Ch...
Read more

The Holocaust’s Most Vicious Killers

Image
  The Holocaust’s Most Vicious Killers During the Holocaust, one group of killers stood out as more vicious, murderous, and bloodthirsty than all others. The Ustasha of Yugoslavia was a Muslim-Catholic alliance of Nazi killers so beastly that even Nazi officials in Berlin were horrified. The Ustasha and three related crack divisions of Arab-Nazi Waffen SS comprised of tens of thousands of Muslim volunteers and terrorized people of all faiths in Yugoslavia. In large measure, these murder machines emerged through the efforts of the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The grand mufti was on a mission to accelerate the extermination of all Jews everywhere. His partner was Adolf Hitler. The epic story of this alliance is one that began in Jerusalem, traveled to Baghdad, culminated in the Balkans, and ultimately spread across all Europe. In many ways, the scene was set centuries ago by the Medina Extermination of 627. Medina was a largely Jewish city. When its 600 or s...
Read more

Inverted hanging, the "Jewish" punishment

Image
  Inverted hanging, the "Jewish" punishment A completely different principle of hanging is to hang the convicted person from their legs, rather than from their neck, either as a form of torture, or as an execution method. In late medieval Germany, this came to be primarily associated with Jews accused of being thieves, called the  Judenstrafe . The jurist Ulrich Tengler, in his  Layenspiegel  from 1509, describes the procedure as follows, in the section "Von Juden straff": To drag the Jew to the ordinary execution place between two angry or biting dogs. After dragging, to hang him from his feet by rope or chain at a designated gallows between the dogs, so that he is directed from life to death Guido Kisch [de] showed that originally, this type of inverted hanging between two dogs was not a punishment specifically for Jews. Esther Cohen writes: The inverted hanging with the accompaniment of two dogs, originally reserved for traitors, was identified...
Read more

Comfort women”

Image
  "Comfort women” Comfort women”  refers to the system of sexual slavery created and controlled by the Imperial Japanese government between 1932 and 1945. It is the largest case of government-sponsored human trafficking and sexual slavery in modern history. Many scholars have argued that the term comfort women, a euphemism coined by the Japanese military, obscures the gravity of the crime. While the authors agree that “military sexual slaves” is a much more accurate and appropriate phrase, we use the term comfort women in this article to refer specifically to the victims of the Japanese military’s sexual slavery system during World War II and “on which decades of international debate, historical research, and legal discourses are mounted,” following the earlier scholarly works. Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, but most scholars agree that hundreds of thousands of women were victimized, and that includes girls as young as twelve years old. A majority of the wo...
Read more

The 371st Fighter Group and the Aftermath of the Holocaust

Image
  The 371st Fighter Group and the Aftermath of the Holocaust Former concentration subcamp prisoners in front of the camp in Holleischen, 1945. In March, 1945, 400 Hungarian-Jewish women were transferred from the Nuremberg subcamp to Hollesischen which held over 1,000 women, including French, Polish and Russian near the end of the war. Shortly after the liberation, these unidentified former inmates were pictured in front of where they were imprisoned.   The 371st Fighter Group and the Aftermath of the Holocaust PORTLAND, Ore. --   During this April 24 through May 1, 2022 Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust, with the Russo-Ukrainian War raging in Europe and perhaps some of the ghosts of World War II being stirred, we remember the terrible things that can happen when one group of human beings are demonized, scapegoated, abused and killed by another group of people because they are different in some way.  Human beings are capable of doing profound good,...
Read more

IN PICTURES: How German women suffered largest mass rape in history by Soviets

Image
  IN PICTURES: How German women suffered largest mass rape in history by Soviets Between the months of January and August of 1945, Germany saw the largest incident of mass rape known in history, where an estimated two million German women were raped by the Soviet Red Army soldiers, as written by Walter Zapotoczny Jr. in his book, ‘ Beyond Duty: The Reason Some Soldiers Commit Atrocities ’. Between the months of April and May, the German capital Berlin saw more than 100,000 rape cases according to hospital reports, while East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia saw more than 1.4 million rape cases. Hospital reports also stated that abortion operations were being carried out daily across all German hospitals. Natalya Gesse, who was a Soviet war correspondent at the time, said that the Soviets didn’t care about the ages of their victims. “The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty. It was an army of rapists,” she said. This caused the deaths of no less...
Read more

Both North and South, white people defended lynching and the murder of presumed rapists as “honor killings.

Image
  Women and Sexual Assault in the United States, 1900–1940 In the United States, the history of sexual assault in the first half of the 20th century involves multiple contradictions between the ordinary, almost invisible accounts of women of all colors who were raped by fathers, husbands, neighbors, boarders, bosses, hired hands, and other known individuals versus the sensational myths that involved rapacious black men, sly white slavers, libertine elites, and virginal white female victims. Much of the debate about sexual assault revolved around the “unwritten law” that justified “honorable” white men avenging the “defilement” of their women. Both North and South, white people defended lynching and the murder of presumed rapists as “honor killings.” In courtrooms, defense attorneys linked the unwritten law to insanity pleas, arguing that after hearing women tell about their assault, husbands and fathers experienced an irresistible compulsion to avenge the rape of their women. Ov...
Read more

Young Girl Tied Upside Down, Tortured On Witchcraft Allegation.

Image
  Young Girl Tied Upside Down, Tortured On Witchcraft Allegation . Young girl tied upside down, tortured on witchcraft allegation A Facebook user has called on the Borno State government to investigate the brutal torturing of a young lady who was tagged a witch. The Borno State government should get justice for this girl (Alh. Fari Muhd) Disturbing photos has been causing serious consternation on the social media showing a young lady being tortured by some people on the allegation of being a witch and killing many members of her family. The incident which was posted by a Facebook user, Alh. Fari Muhd, reportedly happened in Borno State and in it, the lady is seen stripped to her underwear and tied upside down to a pole and being brutalized by the people who are believed to be her relatives. According to Alh. Muhd, the people torturing the girl were said to have repeatedly asked her to confess and name the people she had killed before she was discovered while others are kept s...
Read more

Hatred for Germans

Image
  Hatred for Germans American soldiers force German troops to see the bodies of those who starved to death in Woebbelin. Original Caption: "An American MP escorts the line of German soldiers marched past the graves of the Wobbelin concentration camp starvation visctims under the supervision of the 82nd Airborne Division, U.S. Ninth Army, in the town of Ludwigslust, Germany, where graves have been prepared by German civilians. “God , I hate the Germans,” Eisenhower wrote to his wife, Mamie, in September, 1944. Earlier, in front of the British ambassador to Washington, he had said that all the 3,500 or so officers of the German General Staff should be “exterminated.” The Allies and their concentration camps Former British Army veteran A.W Perkins of Holland-on-Sea described conditions in the ‘Sennelager’ British concentration camp, which shockingly held, not captured troops but civilians. He recounts; “During the latter half of 1945 I was with British troops guarding suspected ...
Read more