Afgantsy

thousand feet high and very close to the border with Pakistan and China.⁴⁹ Two passes lead out of these high mountains and mark the end of the valley: the Khawak Pass (12,624 feet) to the northern plains and the Anjoman Pass (14,534 feet) to Badakhshan, the most north-easterly province of Afghanistan. Passable with difficulty in summer, in the winter they are closed for most purposes. It was over these passes that determined men brought goods, arms, and ammunition to feed the rebellion.

The first Soviet operation in the Pandsher Valley took place in April 1980, only four months after the invasion. Three Soviet battalions participated, including the 4th Battalion of the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade under the command of Captain Leonid Khabarov. About a thousand Afghan soldiers and security police went with them. The plan was that the Soviet troops would block the kishlaks as they advanced and the Afghans would search them. To oppose this force Masud had little more than a thousand men. They were armed mainly with old-fashioned rifles and they had not yet constructed much in the way of defensive works. They mined the only road in the valley, destroyed the bridges, and planned to ambush the invaders.

At first the operation went smoothly. The Russians cleared the mines, rebuilt the bridges, and advanced with reasonable speed. Where the ruined road made it impossible to move forward, they drove along the bed of the river. They quickly reached Masud’s headquarters at the kishlak of Pasishah-Mardan. It had been abandoned in a hurry: the prison was empty and files of documents, lists and identity documents lay scattered all around.

Sergei Morozov, a sergeant in the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade, said, ‘This was the first operation where we met major resistance. There were ambushes, the roads were blown up. Of course I did not know exactly what was going on because I was only a sergeant. We drove as far as we could and then dismounted. After leaving the kishlak which had housed Masud’s headquarters, we marched right to the end of the Pandsher Valley. It was the furthest anyone got during the whole war, and very close to the Pakistan frontier.

‘On the way back along the mountain path, my battalion was ambushed. Thirteen men were killed in the leading platoon. My own platoon had been in the lead on the way out and so we were in the rearguard on the way back. We stopped for the night and had to beat off a number of mujahedin attacks. Their weapons in those days were simple, many of them home-made. They didn’t get mortars until later. The numbers opposing us were very small—perhaps only a few dozen. We had helicopter cover throughout, though not of course at night. During the long march most of the radios failed because the batteries ran out. But I was familiar with radios from before the war and I had turned off my radio when it was out of range or blocked by the mountains. So I had enough power to call in helicopter support when it became necessary… It took us some time to get away from the inflexible tactics we had learned for war in Europe. Although our brigade had been formed for operations in the desert and the mountains, there was a difference between theory and practice. After the first Pandsher operation, I asked my company commander, Captain Khabarov, whether it made sense to advance in clumsy columns, which could get stuck, and often could not turn round. Would it not be better to leapfrog troops forward with helicopters? And of course we did in time learn to do those things.’⁵⁰

The Russians called it a victory. But the rebels considered that the victory was theirs. An Afghan historian has claimed that there were only two hundred armed rebels in the valley at the time, and their only anti-tank weapons were three rocket launchers. They deliberately offered no resistance to the initial Russian advance, but fell on the Russians as they withdrew down the mountains. The rebel newspaper The Call of the Jihad claimed that a hundred Soviet and Afghan soldiers were killed, ten guns were captured, and eight tanks and other vehicles damaged. The rebels lost four dead. Twenty-five civilians were also killed.⁵¹

Naturally enough, Masud used the ceasefire of 1983–4 to enlarge and re-equip his forces. Soviet intelligence calculated that by then he had three thousand five hundred men. Five hundred were defending the entrance to the valley. Another two thousand were operating against the Afghan and Soviet garrisons. The remainder were in the north-east part of the valley, and their task was to ward off airborne landings.⁵²

Under pressure from the Afghan leadership, Moscow decided in the spring of 1984 to deal with Masud once and for all. This time they would use a total of 11,000 Soviet and 2,600 Afghan troops, together with 200 aircraft and 190 helicopters.

Special forces troops went in first. They discovered that the rebel positions were empty. The Russians decided not to call off the operation, since the bombers, carrying cluster as well as high explosive bombs, the largest weighing nine tons, had already taken off from their bases inside the Soviet Union.⁵³ The air strike lasted about two hours.

The main force moved in at four o’clock on 19 April, preceded by sappers. On 30 April the second battalion of the 682nd Motor-rifle Regiment was particularly badly hit, thanks to the carelessness of the regimental commander, who had ordered it to advance into a ravine leading off the valley without first securing the commanding heights. At first the battalion met no resistance. They lowered their guard and were promptly ambushed from three sides. In the resulting fight, the battalion lost fifty-three dead, including twelve officers, and fifty-eight wounded. Private Nikolai Knyazev described the aftermath.

‘My platoon was guarding the regimental command post when we heard a sudden commotion, and the regimental commander told us that one of our battalions had been attacked, and that there were wounded and dead.

‘We loaded stretchers on to our armoured vehicles and started up the ravine. After waiting for darkness, we continued on foot. There were about ten of us together with the platoon commander. It was not easy to make our way along the mountain paths and it took us a long time, since there were boulders and terraces everywhere, which made it difficult to work out the distance we had covered. We seemed to be marching for eternity.

‘After a while we saw a strange light shining in the darkness and the platoon commander ordered us to lie down; but we soon worked out that it was light shining through the periscopes of a BMP. We had barely moved any distance further when we were fired on by a Kalashnikov. Our platoon commander, Lieutenant Arutiunov, fired a rocket, we shouted out, and the firing stopped. We came up close. It was one of our own BMPs, which had been blown up by a mine. The driver and the deputy political officer of the battalion, Major Kononenko, had remained with the vehicle, both suffering from concussion. We moved forward. After a little while we met the razvedchiki who had been sent ahead of us. They were carrying some dead bodies, including the body of the battalion commander, Captain Korolev. Everybody sobered up in a moment.

‘It was already getting light… as we arrived at a kishlak. As we went down the main street, we heard the sound of motors. Two of the battalion’s BMPs were moving towards us. They were loaded down with the bodies of dead soldiers. Arms and legs stuck out of the pile in different directions. Smashed- up radios and rocket launchers were piled up as well. A group of soldiers who had survived the battle were walking behind the armoured vehicles. It was terrible to look at their faces. They were finished, they expressed no emotion, they were like zombies.

‘We brought the survivors back to the main body of the regiment. A helicopter landed nearby and some generals emerged. One of them ordered the surviving soldiers to form up. They had not yet pulled themselves together and still smelled of corpses—they had been lying among the dead for days (I can’t even imagine what had gone on in their heads). One of the visitors came up to them and shouted, ‘Bastards! Wankers! You’re standing here, you bastards, and your comrades are lying out there! Why are you here?!’—that’s how he addressed them. Then he read them the riot act and left with the feeling that he had done his duty. The lads stood silent and unfeeling—perhaps they did not even hear him.

‘That evening we were ordered to return to the scene of the action and bring back the remaining bodies. Imagine an open area about a hundred metres square. The river runs through the middle. On the right-hand side there is a level place, a few terraces and a hill about two or three hundred metres high. To the left of the river there is a path, an overhanging wall of rock on one side and on the other a sheer drop into the river.

‘It was immediately clear that we were in the right place. There was a heavy smell of corpses—the boys had been lying there for nearly two days, and at that time of year it is already getting hot. We were very much afraid that the rebels were waiting for someone to come to collect the bodies and that we too would end up lying there. We made our way to the foot of the hill, to the terraces. First we came across the body of a sergeant who