Tari9 Ila Kaboul Film Complet

[Malcolm Lozada]

Thesmall measure of calm restored after Hekmatyar’s retreatto the south was not to last. Many of the factions still in the city wereopenly hostile to one another, and Hekmatyar still wanted a major share ofpower in the new government.

After peace talks between Massoud and Hekmatyar on May 25, thegovernment initially agreed to name Hekmatyar as prime minister, but theagreement collapsed in less than a week, when President Mujaddidi’s plane cameunder rocket fire as he returned from a trip to Islamabad on May 29. Mujaddidiclaimed that both Hekmatyar’s forces and former agents from the Najibullahgovernment had conducted the attack, and that Hekmatyar had earlier threated toshoot down his plane.23 Meanwhile, Hekmatyar continued to demand that Dostum’s Uzbek militias leave Kabul (which might then allow him to seize the city and expel Massoud’s forces).24 ByMay 30, Jamiat and Junbish forces were again fighting with Hetmatyar’s forcesin the south of the city. Hekmatyar began shelling and rocketing Kabul in early June, hitting all areas of the city, and Junbish and Jamiat forces shelledareas to the south of the city. Meanwhile, Sunni Ittihad and Shi’a Wahdatfactions in Kabul began fighting with one another in west Kabul.

As shown in sections below, the fighting between Jamiat andHezb-e Islami, along with the clashes between Ittihad and Wahdat and laterconflicts between Wahdat and Jamiat, led to tens of thousands civilian deathsand injuries, and caused hundreds of thousands to flee Kabul for saferareas.

This section describes inter-factional hostilities in WestKabul and rocket and artillery attacks on Kabul by Hezb-e Islami forces to thesouth of the city. The section concludes with a section discussing theviolations of international humanitarian law and human rights law which tookplace during these hostilities.

In May 1992, mere days after Hekmatyar was first driven fromKabul, the predominately Sunni-Pashtun Ittihad forces (under Abdul Rabbal-Rasul Sayyaf) and the predominately Shi’a-Hazara Wahdat forces (under AbdulAli Mazari) began skirmishing in west Kabul, shooting rockets at each other andengaging in street battles. Each sought to dislodge the other from variousneighborhoods or government buildings which each force occupied.

The battles, taking place in the midst of a dense civiliansetting, predictably caused high numbers of casualties and lead to widespreaddestruction of civilian homes and infrastructure. The battles also becameincreasingly meaningless as the buildings each side occupied in the areas indispute disintegrated into rubble. Much of west Kabul remains in ruins as of mid-2005,mostly because of fighting in 1992-1996.

A high-level Afghan military officer, General Mohammed NabiAzimi, who served as a Soviet-era general and was cooperating at the time withthe new government to create a national army, recounted in his 1998 memoirs thebeginning of the fighting between Wahdat and Ittihad forces:

Regardless of the proximate causes of the first clashes, thefact that conflict arose between Ittihad and Wahdat forces was not suprising. There was high tension between Wahdat, who were predominately Shi’a Muslims,and the Sunni Ittihad faction, whose members follow an ultra-conservativeIslamic creed, Wahabbism, which views Shi’ism as heretical. A great deal oftension was also caused by the influence of foreign combatants and foreignmilitary advisors and intelligence agents from Iran and possibly Saudi Arabia,who were working with some of the factions—Iranians with Wahdat and Saudis withIttihad. Numerous Iranian agents were assisting Wahdat forces, as Iran was attempting to maximize Wahdat’s military power and influence in the newgovernment. Saudi agents of some sort, private or governmental, were trying tostrengthen Sayyaf and his Ittihad faction to the same end.

Rare ceasefires, usually negotiated by Jamiat commanders,representatives of Mujaddidi or Rabbani, or officials from the InternationalCommittee of the Red Cross (ICRC), commonly collapsed within days. Compoundingthe problem, some of the other parties in Kabul periodically joined thefighting at various times, serving to intensify the conflict. Harakat forcessometimes joined the fight with Wahdat against Ittihad. After Wahdat attackedJamiat positions in July 1992, and hit civilian areas around them, Massoud’stroops launched retaliatory artillery attacks on west Kabul (which likewisekilled numerous civilians).26

What can I say? What I saw in those days I can neverforget. Hundreds of people were wounded when they fought—every time theyfought. The hospital would be full of patients, overwhelmed; we couldn’t treateveryone who was brought there. People were dying in the halls. People wouldnot get treatment. There were dead bodies everywhere, and blood. When thefighting was very bad, and we couldn’t transport anyone anywhere, there wouldbe dead bodies in the hospital for weeks at a time. . . . Whenever thejournalists came, they would ask the same questions: “How many rockets hit? How many were killed? How many were injured?” That’s all they were interestedin. . . .

My wife was delivering our first child. Because I waspoor, we were in our home, we could not leave to go anywhere [i.e. to ahospital]. So my wife told me to bring her sister, to help. So I went to westKabul, to Qargha [on the border of Paghman district], to get her. . . . [T]he fighting had started while I was there. So we took the road up throughAfshar. So we were going on the road, my sister-in-law on the bicycle behindme.

From Qargha to Afshar, on the road, I saw manycorpses—seventeen, eighteen, I don’t know—all civilians. They were commuters,people riding on the road [i.e., on bicycles], not fighters. Their bodies wereswollen up. Also, I saw combatants, Hazaras, tied to trees, shot dead. I sawfour fighters like this. My sister-in-law, of course, was very upset, and shestarted vomiting, so I had to stop. She was vomiting, and could not go on. Till this day, she does not eat meat. . . . So we turned back. We went backto Qargha, and then we went on another road. . . . When I got to my home, mywife had delivered my first child, and my first child was dead. To bury himwas very difficult, with so much fighting going on, it was very difficult.29

They were constantly shelling the civilian areas of west Kabul, and Afshar. . . . Shura-e Nazar would sometimes attack them from the zoo, and thesilo [a grain warehouse in west Kabul]. Sayyaf’s forces would attack from thewest: Dasht-e Barchi [to the southwest] and Kohte-e Sangi [central west Kabul]. West Kabul was destroyed by the fighting between Ittihad and Wahdat, and by theartillery and rockets fired by Shura-e Nazar off of Television Mountain andMamorine [the two peaks in the center of Kabul city]. . . . I went to a lot ofplaces where the rockets and shells would fall. I saw many bodies, terriblesights. 30

The first week of June 1992 was particularly bad, asHekmatyar’s forces were also launching artillery attacks on the city from thesouth.31 (For more on Hekmatyar’s shelling of the city, see the following section). Jamilurrahman Kamgar, a resident of Kabul who later published hiscontemporaneous chronicle of events in this period, wrote of heavy clashesbetween Wahdat and Ittihad forces, including attacks on a government mediatorattempting to stop the fighting (June 2); the abduction of dozens of civiliansby Hazara and Ittihad forces (June 3); hundreds of injuries and deaths, the RedCross hospital filled to capacity, and hundreds of families forced to leavedestroyed houses (June 5).32

[Friday, June 5, 1992] -- [A]ttacks continued, and moreshops, schools and homes were destroyed in the ravaged capital. At least 20 morepeople were killed and 100 others injured. . . . Rival forces pounded eachother with rockets and mortars, destroying entire blocks of shops and houses,and knocking down power lines. In downtown Kabul, rockets slammed into threeempty schools, killing four passers-by and setting fires. Missiles also fellon a house in northern Kabul, killing a family of six, witnesses said. Unidentified gunmen raked a row of shops near the Kabul zoo, killing orinjuring 10 people, witnesses said. . . . Residents in predominantly Shiiteneighborhoods also accused Sunni rebels of looting shops and houses, killingprisoners, gouging out the eyes of wounded guerrillas and burning dead bodies.33

A journalist from Agence France-Presse saw hundreds ofcivilians fleeing from the west the same week, and witnessed some being shot byrandom gunfire and wounded children being carted to hospitals in wheelbarrows.34

Suddenly, there was an explosion and a lot of firing ofweapons. Everything was bullets, it was very severe. Everyone was rushing toflee from the violence. Husbands forgot wives, brothers forgot sisters,mothers forgot children, uncles forgot nephews—everyone was running away, andcould only think of safety. . . . People were fleeing into our neighborhoodbecause it was controlled by Shura-e Nazar. Wahdat was attacking from thesouth side of Kohte-e Sangi [a traffic roundabout south of the silo], andSayyaf’s forces were in Khushal Khan [to the west of the silo]. Both sideswanted to seize the property in that area: they wanted to use the places thereto establish military positions. Both sides marched into the civilian areasand took up positions in people’s houses. They were shooting at each otherwith rockets, guns, all sorts of weapons.

My house was where Shura-e Nazar had a checkpoint. Icould see the women and men rushing away from the fighting, running down thestreet towards us. At the same time, some of the bullets, or shrapnel from theexplosions, was hitting people. So men and women were falling down into thestreet. They would be running, and then the bullets would hit them, and theywould fall down. The other people just kept running, and were not bothering tosave those who fell. They were all rushing to save themselves. It was aterrible day. . . .

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