Kandahar Assassins: Stories from the Afghan-Soviet War

David J. Kilcullen:

Guerrillas of Kandahar in the Soviet-Afghan War

The Pashtun word cherik can mean both guerrilla and assassin. Mohammed Gumnan uses it in both senses in the account that follows — a tale of the conflict in Kandahar Province in the early 1980s, during the first years of what today we call the Soviet-Afghan War. One of the most striking things about Gumnan’s book, however, is how little the Soviets themselves feature in it.

The Afghan guerrillas directed their main effort against local Afghan Communists [known to both Gumnan and the guerrillas he profiles as khalqis, from their presumed membership in the Khalq faction of the Afghan communist party]. Gumnan’s account depicts an insurgent movement that mainly attacked local Afghan officials and military leaders and, like any guerrilla group, preyed on isolated or weak targets, though they sometimes attacked formed units of the Afghan Army. They also targeted government sympathizers and collaborators within the Kandahari population. As a secondary effort, the guerrillas attacked Soviet advisors and mentors working with the Afghan government, and occasionally targeted the Soviet Army directly. But the vast majority of attacks were directed at khalqis and their local supporters — indeed, out of dozens of incidents described in the book, Gumnan mentions only one attack against Soviet advisors and their families, and one combat incident directly involving Soviet troops.

The guerrilla war in Kandahar province involved many different factions, operating in a loose and shifting series of temporary alliances of convenience. This dynamic insurgency included relatively large full-time mobile columns in the countryside, small hit teams in urban areas, underground intelligence and propaganda cells, and a vast and distributed network of financial and logistical support on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier.

Mohammed Tahir Aziz Gumnan was part of the support network on the Pakistan side, an Afghan refugee who worked as a medical orderly in a series of hospitals in Quetta, the major city of Baluchistan. Gumnan hated his life of exile, yearned to return to Afghanistan, and regarded Pakistan as a foreign country. He seems to have sought relief for his homesickness, and his sense of disconnectedness from the fight in his homeland, by seeking out the company, and transcribing the life stories, of the wounded fighters whom he and the medical teams were treating in the hospital wards. These fighters came from all over Afghanistan, sometimes brought in by a guerrilla comrade or a family member, and sometimes by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Gumnan mentions wounded fighters coming from Ghazni, Helmand, Zabul and Uruzgan in Afghanistan’s south and east, but also from Herat and Farah in the west. Nonetheless, he seems to have focused his attention on collecting tales of the jihad from convalescent guerrillas who had been operating in Kandahar, immediately opposite Baluchistan.

Gumnan’s book is a series of tales from two of these Kandahari mujahidin—Noor Mohammad, son of Abdul Zahir, from Dand district, Spin Ziyarat, in the rural south of Kandahar province, and Abdul Ghaffar, son of Hajji Sayyed Mohammad, from Kandahar City’s fifth district. Noor Mohammad, known as The Lame Ghazi, tells mainly of his own exploits in the rural districts around Kandahar and on the city’s outskirts. Abdul Ghaffar, whom Gumnan calls The Martyr Ghaffari [both he and Noor Mohammad were later killed] describes both his own activities and those of several other fighters in the urban guerrilla campaign—mainly taking the form of kidnappings, assassinations, ambushes and raids on government installations — in Kandahar city itself.

The book might be considered a Thousand-and-One Nights of the Afghan jihad, since Gumnan structured it in a consciously classical tale-telling style, framing each story with a vignette from the hospital, and interspersing narrative prose with verse and song. Whatever its literary merits, however, his account is mainly of interest because of the continuities it illuminates between the tactics, organization and attitudes of guerrillas in the 1980s and those of the insurgents [loosely described as Taliban] who operate in the same areas today.

As Lester Grau and Ali Jalali showed in The Other Side of the Mountain, their classic study of mujahideen tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War, the Afghan guerrilla is a creature of habit. Grau and Jalali cited numerous instances of guerrilla groups using the same tactics, in the same places, again and again over a period of many years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, Gumnan’s account shows a guerrilla movement using strikingly similar tactics to those the Taliban use today. These tactics included drive-by shootings, kidnappings, at least one beheading, pistol assassinations, ambushes, roadside bombings, night raids and rocket and mortar bombardments. Likewise, there was a strong overlap among locations that were dominated by insurgents in the 1980s [the urban Kandahar neighborhood of Mahalajat, for example, or the rural districts of Panjwai and Maiwand], and the places that are dominated by Taliban insurgents today. So-called Taliban fronts— composed of religious students fighting under the direction of their mullahs, or of recruits from madrassahs or refugee camps in Pakistan — were also present during the early 1980s, though they were by no means dominant actors in the guerrilla operations of that time.

Equally, however, there were significant differences from today’s conflict. The sophistication of roadside bombs, for example, is vastly greater today than in the 1980s. In the operations Gumnan describes, the guerrillas occasionally made use of mortar bombs or captured land mines, but did not employ the sophisticated triggers and improvised remote-controlled explosive devices used today. Nor did they conduct suicide bombings, raid and penetrate major military bases, or seize and hold government facilities or buildings within the city for any extended period, as today’s insurgents do. Rather, the guerrillas of the 1980s operated in both urban and rural variations of the traditional patterns of banditry — preying on government officials and rural road traffic, picking off isolated posts or individuals, and raiding the institutions of the state before disappearing again into the night, the countryside or the urban warren of old Kandahar.

In a broader sense, neither the guerrillas of the 1980s nor today’s Taliban operated within a conscious insurgency or revolutionary warfare frame of reference. Gumnan’s narrative focuses wholly within the framework of a defensive Islamic jihad against an infidel invader and a collaborationist regime of country-sellers, and thus fits much more neatly within traditions of Islamic warfare, on the one hand, and nationalist resistance warfare, on the other, than within an insurgency or People’s War paradigm. This tends to suggest that, whatever differences might exist between Gumnan’s assassins of Kandahar and today’s Taliban, one key similarity is the danger of mirror-imaging, projecting onto an opponent the same mental framework that an occupying military force uses. Whatever else it may be, Gumnan’s detailed and lyrical account of the war that he and his contemporaries fought against in Kandahar during the 1980s is a useful corrective for such errors.

Kandahar Assassins

This is dedicated to all the fighters of the Hindu Kush and historical Ariana who offered their heads and holy blood on the path of Islam, faith and the homeland.

This is dedicated to all pained hearts, sorrowful elders, sisters with uncovered heads, innocent orphans and wounded mothers, all of whom sacrificed their best sons for the way of Islam and the greatness of the soil.

Dedicated to those hero martyrs with whose holy red pearls deserts, mountainsides and gardens are flowered and purpled.

The Lame Ghazi

GHAZI MARTYR COMMANDER NOOR MOHAMMAD

This day my incapable pen is writing about the martyrdom of an esteemed mujahed. If black blood flows from the nib of the pen, red tears flow from my eyes as well and the reason is that a fragrant beautiful flower has fallen from our garden. Great Allah grows the very colourful and beautiful flowers in this world from the dusty soil.

They are elegant, beautiful, and fragrant and from an aesthetic aspect one is more beautiful than the other. But when a flower of this quality is removed from the plant, that flower fades and gradually loses its fragrance. Then it will dry up and will disappear, but in this world there are also gardens whose flowers are many times more beautiful and fragrant and their greatest quality is that they are immortal. The fragrance and freshness of these flowers — unlike others — increases when removed from the plant. The angels of the sky will be surprised by their beauty. These gardens are the Islamic jihadi fronts in the wide lap of Afghanistan, and their immortal flowers are the martyrs of the fronts’ holy path. One of these fronts is Hajji Nanai’s or Sar Gul’s front in Kandahar, a big province and one of the fragrant and immortal flowers of this front is Ghazi Martyr Noor Mohammad, son of Abdul Zahir, from Dand district, Spin Ziyarat, Kandahar province. The young Ghazi[1] is known as the Lame Commander.

This good looking flower of ours lit the candle of his jihad with the Kandahari mujahedeen after the ominous Saur coup.

Yes, today my incapable pen writes about the martyrdom of a mujahed who has performed outstanding services in the city of Ahmad Shah Abdali for Islam and the homeland. The mujahed — who left me the surprising gifts of guerrilla operations a few days ago but today is absent — is gone and can’t be found among us. He departed on the trip of the great path and took steps toward the great position of prosperity. He took with him the examination paper of this mortal world [that he had passed] very successfully.

This outstanding protector of Islam, with other mujahedeen, sacrificed his last drops of blood for the religion, homeland and our honour in a heavy fight in Mahalajat with the Soviets on 23/04/1361 [June 14, 1982] during the first days of ramazan[2].

We are for Allah and we are returning to Allah.

This young martyr gave this country unforgettable service. He was much-loved by Kandahar’s people and that’s why his jihad and heroism continued as stories among them.

Prayer ceremonies were held in many Kandahari families after his martyrdom and parties among Khalqi institutions, because this young hero had inflicted much damage to the Khalqi regime and the Khalqis were unable to catch him despite their great power. Martyr Noor Mohammad was a very brave and handsome youth; at the same time he was very delicate and had a sense of humour. He didn’t like to show off and would appreciate and respect the operations of other guerrillas[3]. It was very difficult for me to learn the story of his operations from him and I only have a few of his activities and memories that I present to you now, dear readers. You can best judge this and see what a mujahed we have buried.

Respectfully,

Mohammad Tahir Aziz Gumnam

30/07/1360 [22/10/1981]

THE HERO GHAZI AND I

We were passing the days and nights of 1359 [1980] with sorrowful dawns and evenings. Heroes from Kandahar’s great trenches were being sent to hospital beds one after another. Those days were the days of our our desperation and grief because we didn’t have a bed even for any Afghan hero mujahed in the entire state of Baluchistan. We didn’t have a pharmacist, nurse or a hospital. The language, culture, behaviours and habits were all strange to us in this alien country. Everywhere was filled with unpleasantness for us. Everybody had put traps for us in such a condition. We had to bear everything and ignore all these inhumane treatments.

In such a state, on one of those days a hearty youth opened the door and, before even saying hello, asked who the servant of the wounded was. All the other people in the room laughed under their moustaches. I was curious as to what had happened, so I asked him what the matter was. He told me to hurry up and that he had brought Mairu’s mother. I asked who Mairu’s mother was and what had happened to her. He told me that he had brought a wounded mujahed who had been hit in his shoulder and liver by mortar shrapnel. I stood up and took that mujahed to Hajji Akram’s Hospital. They started his treatment. I looked at the wounded mujahed’s turban by chance and — removed from his head — I saw it had holes in it all over. I asked that hearty youth when the incident had taken place. He told me that it was two days earlier. Then I asked him where, and he said in Kandahar at Dand intersection. I asked about the shrapnel in his abdomen and he said, two days earlier.

Both happened on the same day? I asked.

He replied, yes.

I asked him how it was that the turban of the mujahed was torn up by shrapnel but that they hadn’t hit his head. He told me that there were many strange and surprising incidents during the jihad. One only had to believe. I asked if the attack at Dand Intersection was a joint attack, but he told me that it was just by the Lame Commander. I asked if the enemy had taken any casualties, and he told me that an eight-cylinder vehicle had been destroyed together with the Khalqis inside.

I told him that I had heard of [a fighter called] the Lame Ghazi many times. ‘Ghazi the Lame’ or ‘the Lame Commander’ must have a meaning, I said. He agreed, and said it meant coward. I told him that coward didn’t match the idea of a mujahed and that it was unfair of him to call them that. He gave me his picture and said, here, you judge whether he was a coward or not.

When I saw the picture it was his own picture. He laughed at me and asked whether it was that of a jackal or a fox. I told him that his face seemed like that of a lion and his humour like that of a fox. He laughed at me again and I liked his laughter a lot. His beautiful young and local accent reminded me of the delicate speech of our country.

I put his picture in my pocket; he asked me what I wanted it for. I told him that it was a matter of pride for me. He told me at least to write ‘Noor Mohammad from Spin Ziyarat’ on it. I agreed. He then asked me whether I would be able to fix him up with a rocket launcher; I told him that he could ask me for medicine. At that point he showed me one of his legs in which there was a bullet that you could touch with your hand and then he showed me his other leg that had a bullet lodged in it as well.

He asked me what we should do about them. I told him that we could immediately start treatment. He said that there was no point in doing that because he would return to Kandahar and other bullets would hit his legs again. Rather, he said, we should wait until there are lots of bullets so we can take them out all at once. If he was martyred they would stay with him and he would use one of them to hit Taraki[4] and the other to hit Amin[5].

He asked my opinion about that. I told him that we should get those bullets out but he said he didn’t want to do that. He added that he would carry out guerrilla operations even on Doomsday and would keep those two bullets for Taraki and Amin as gifts. The wounded mujahed was treated and the shrapnel taken out. The mujahed recovered completely and joined the Islamic movement again. The Ghazi youth stayed with me a little longer and told me many strange stories. Of course, each of those activities was out of the capacity of humans. The Lame Ghazi also moved on himself. […] The Lame Ghazi accepted martyrdom’s pride proudly in an Islamic coffin and left history that had been written with his blood. May he be happy and perfumed.

May his memory remain happy.

The Ghazi hero took part in many guerrilla operations but I present you, the reader, with a selection that I have written down.

THE RUSTAM OF HIS TIME

I saw the Ghazi youth in the office and told him that I had heard some strange news from Kandahar. He asked me what those reports were. I told him to come and sit, and then I had him enter the office. I had him sit in front of me and put on some tea. I again told him that there were such strange reports coming out of Kandahar. He asked me to tell him the information. I told him there was a condition for passing on that information and the condition was that he would have to tell me a sweet story of his activities and