embassy in these last days. Fighting continued to grow in the western part of the city and one day the staff were ordered to the shelter, where they spent much time as the embassy and the area around it were increasingly subjected to deliberate rocket and artillery bombardment.20
Galina Ivanov and the other embassy wives lived in the shelter while their men went to their offices to work. There were two or three dozen men there as well. Several of them behaved badly: they let themselves go, did not bother to shave, quarrelled over the ration of food and water, and complained when Galina put a little food aside for the embassy dog. It got so unpleasant that she and the other women took to sleeping in the polyclinic until her husband, Valeri, acting on a hunch, rang to say that an attack was expected any minute: they were to get out of the polyclinic and seek proper shelter in the cellar of the embassy shop. The polyclinic was blown to pieces just as they were leaving and they barely escaped.21
The ambassador did what he could to build a workable relationship with such Afghan government as there still was. Soviet trading organisations continued to operate in Kabul under the overall direction of Valeri Ivanov. Yuri Muratkhanian was the director of Afsotr, the joint Soviet-Afghan transport company. On 12 August 1992 he was drinking tea with his wife, Nina, in their flat with Yevgeni Konovalov, the bookkeeper at the Russian trade office, when the building was hit by a shell from a tank. Nina and Konovalov were both mortally wounded, and died a few days later. Their bodies were sealed in zinc coffins and stored in the refrigerator which had been set aside as a morgue. The electricity kept failing and the freon in the refrigerator began to run out. Some Afghan friends braved the bombardment to bring in more.22
That same evening Najibullah called in the senior Russian military adviser, General Lagoshin, and told him that he and his colleagues—there were by now only seven military advisers left in Kabul—must leave Afghanistan urgently. The rebels would soon take power and he himself could survive in the post of president for only five more days. Najibullah added that, although the Soviets had betrayed him, he felt it was his duty to send the military advisers home safe and sound. And indeed, when the airport authorities put up various obstacles to their departure the next day, Najibullah came personally to the airport to help get them off to Tashkent.23
The following day Najibullah appealed to the UN to fly him into exile as his government finally fell to pieces. His party was stopped at the airport, which was now controlled by General Dostum, and he sought asylum in what he hoped would be the safe haven of the UN headquarters in Kabul.24
By now it made no sense to keep people in Kabul and the Russians decided to evacuate the embassy. The operation began at four o’clock on the morning of 28 August, when three aircraft left Termez for Kabul. The new ambassador, Yevgeni Ostrovenko, who had only been in Kabul for a few months, drove to the airport with his staff, picking up diplomats from Mongolia, China, Indonesia, and India on the way.
Both what was left of the Afghan government and the mujahedin had guaranteed that the Russian aircraft would land and leave Kabul safely. The three Il-76s flew in, firing flares to decoy rockets. Valeri Ivanov and his wife, Galina, the coffins containing the bodies of Nina Muratkhanian and Yevgeni Konovalov, and a number of other people and goods were loaded on to the first plane. It took off safely, climbing steeply to thirteen thousand feet to avoid the rockets before setting course for home. But then the mujahedin started to bombard the airport. The second aircraft also took off successfully, though several tyres on the undercarriage had been shredded by splinters. But the third aircraft was set on fire, and the ambassador’s wife, who had already gone on board, barely escaped. The paratroopers and aircrew were able to save some documents but no baggage as they jumped out of the aircraft just before it blew up.
The commander of the first aircraft refused to return to pick up those left behind, explaining to Ivanov that he had run out of flares. ‘You would have to pay a very great deal to get me to change my mind,’ he said, presumably as a joke. In Termez—in what was by now independent Uzbekistan—the airport staff refused to refuel the aircraft or supply food and water for the crew and the passengers unless they were given the two KaMAZ lorries the aircraft was carrying as a bribe. That was a measure, Ivanov thought, of how far things had deteriorated since the break-up of the Soviet Union.
The remainder of the embassy staff, including Ambassador Ostrovenko and his wife, had to be ferried out to Mazar-i Sharif in several An-12s provided by General Dostum. From there they were flown home.
One of the soldiers had rescued the bullet-riddled flag from the flagpole on the Russian Embassy. Years later it still hung in his office.25
Those who looked for parallels remembered that, two decades earlier, the American Embassy staff had been rescued from Saigon in circumstances even more humiliating.
There was now no coherent authority in the capital. The Uzbek militia commander General Dostum, who had hitherto been one of Najibullah’s most effective commanders, had joined Masud and Hekmatyar in a drive on the capital. But their unity was ephemeral. The endemic hostility between the various mujahedin factions now broke out in an even more vicious form. Kabul had suffered little during the nine years of the Soviet war. Now much of it was destroyed by indiscriminate bombardment, and its people were subjected to looting, rape, and murder. Masud’s troops were involved in some of the worst atrocities against the Hazara minority. By 1996 some forty thousand of the inhabitants are said to have been killed and two hundred thousand had fled.26
The civil war was brought to an end by the Taliban. Many of them had grown up in the refugee camps in Pakistan and had been educated in the orthodox Muslim schools there. They enjoyed their first success in the spring of 1994, when they captured the town of Spin Boldak on the Pakistani frontier. From then on they moved inexorably forward, capturing Kandahar but checked for a while at Kabul, where Masud seemed to be prevailing. Backed by Pakistan, they then turned their attention to the west of the country, taking over the base at Shindand with its aircraft, and capturing Herat without a fight in September 1995. The fighting around Mazar-i Sharif was marked by massacres on both sides, but the Taliban finally established themselves there in August 1996. Jalalabad and Kabul fell in September.27
For most of the inhabitants of Kabul the victory of the Taliban was, at least at first, a return to a kind of security and some sense of order, even if it was enforced by a brutal version of sharia law. But for Najibullah it was the end. The Taliban forcibly seized him and his brother in the UN headquarters, tortured them, castrated them, and hanged their bodies in the centre of the city.
At first Masud’s political and military career continued to flourish after the Russians had left. But the changing fortunes and shifting alliances of the civil war, and above all the rise of the Taliban, saw him increasingly on the defensive, under air attack, pushed back from Kabul. He fought with all his old skill, supported by Iran, Uzbekistan, and Russia. But he was eventually driven back into his old base in the Pandsher Valley. There he became leader of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance, which grouped together the leaders of the small proportion—one-tenth—of the country which was still free of the Taliban.
Despite these setbacks, the Russians continued to build up their links with Masud and the Northern Alliance. He corresponded with President Yeltsin and Yevgeni Primakov (1929–), who at that time was heading the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.28 In February 1994 Russian representatives came for secret talks with him in Afghanistan. In 1998 Masud sent his Foreign Minister, Abdullah Abdullah, to Moscow for talks about military- technical cooperation and the provision of military assistance. His representatives met with the Russian Chief of Staff, General Kvashnin, Yeltsin’s assistant Sevostyanov, and Deputy Foreign Minister Pastukhov. In 2000 serious fighting flared up again. The Taliban used tanks and aircraft against Masud, who despite being increasingly short of equipment and supplies was able to beat them off. In the spring of that year the Taliban declared a jihad against Russia. In October Masud met the Russian Minister of Defence, Marshal Sergeev, in Dushanbe and the Russians agreed to supply him with weapons and ammunition. The Taliban promptly issued a warning: ‘Russia should cease interfering in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, otherwise it may create for itself many dangerous problems and grave consequences.’ In December 2000, on the proposal of Russia and the United States, the United Nations Security Council agreed on further sanctions against the Taliban. In April 2001 Masud visited the European Parliament in Brussels and asked for help in the fight against the Taliban, whose associates Al Qaeda, he warned, would next turn their attention to the US and Europe.29
