Mujahideen atrocities in Afghanistan

[Jacob Peters]

15-21 March 1979: 200 Soviet civilians are butchered in Herat

1 January 1980: Soviet citizens are hacked to pieces in Kandahar

March 1982: a bomb exploded at the Ministry of Education, damaging several buildings.

March 1982: a widespread power failure darkened Kabul when a pylon on the transmission line from the Naghlu power station was blown up.

June 1982: a column of about 1,000 young party activists sent out to work in the Panjshir valley were ambushed within 20 miles of Kabul, with heavy loss of life.

4 September 1985: terrorists shot down a domestic Bakhtar Airlines plane as it took off from Kandahar airport, murdering all 52 people aboard.

9 October 1987: 27 people were murdered by a car bomb set off by terrorists in Kabul

May-August 1992: punctuated rocket assaults killed tens of thousands of residents, devastated whole neighborhoods, disrupted power and water supplies, and generated 500,000 refugees.

The above was mostly derived from the Colliers Yearbook volumes from the 1980s. The following is derived from the Russian General Staff's study of the Afghan war. A sample of it can be found here:
http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/grasovintroduction.html

The Afghan insurgents employed chemical weapons in strength. They used an unstable poisonous substance that acted as an irritant. The Afghan resistance resorted to terrorist methods as well. The Mujahideen leaders paid great attention to sabotage and terrorist activities. The more comon types of sabotage included damaging power lines, knocking out pipelines, radio stations, blowing up government office buildings, air terminals, hotels, cinemas, and so on. From 1985 through 1987, over 1800 terrorist acts were recorded. In the border region with Pakistan, the mujahideen would often launch 800 rockets per day. Between April 1985 and Janaury 1987, they carried out over 23,500 shelling attacks on government targets. The mujahideen surveyed firing positions that they normally located near villages within the range of Soviet artillery posts. They put the villagers in danger of death from Soviet retaliation. The mujahideen used mine warfare heavily. Often, they would enlist the services of the local inhabitants and even children.

They systematically targetted civilian infrastructure and government installations. They concentrated on knocking out bridges, closing major roads, destroying convoys, disrupting the electric power system and industrial production, and attacking police stations and Soviet military installations and air bases. They assassinated government officials and PDPA members. They laid to siege small rural outposts.

Terrorist groups had three to five men in each. After they received their mission to murder this or that government statesman, they busied themselves with studying his pattern of life and its details and then selecting the method of fulfilling their established mission. They practiced shooting at automobiles, shooting out of automobiles, laying mines in government accommodation or houses, using poison, and rigging explosive charges in transport.