Soviets tell of brutal war

Press, 22 September 1980, Page 6

Soviets tell of brutal war

By MICHAEL BINYON, of “The Times” (through NZPA)

Anti-government insurgents have spread death and destruction throughout Afghanistan, murdering. and mutilating , civilians, killing cattle, and destroying villages, according to an unusually frank description of the guerrilla war in a Soviet weekly journal. An account in “New times,” which contrasts starkly with the optimistic stories of pacification and the restoration of normality put out by the official Afghan news agency, makes it clear that the fighting is widespread, bloody, and brutal. • A Tass summary said that in Herat sebres of small shops had been reduced to smouldering ruins. In Nimruz province mines had been planted in the water reservoir. The main school in Nangarhar was marked by firescorched walls. Near Jalalabad guerrillas had herded cattle out of the State farm, trampled down crops, blown up main roads, destroyed villages, bridges and electric power lines and mutilated the dead bodies of women, children, and old men. “This is the style of the Afghan counter-revolution. Such are the realities of the undeclared war which was unleashed against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan by imperialist reaction

together with the Peking hegemonists,” "New Times” commented. It said that after large formations of “bandits” had been eliminated, gangs sent from abroad adopted new tactics. “The main stake is terror. The aim is to keep people constantly in fear. Subversive acts, explosions an arson are bound to paralyze economic _ activity. Repressions against workers and peasants, terrorist acts against party functionaries, politicians, and teachers — all this is done to weaken the social , basis of the revolution in the towns and countryside.” • The journal said that the guerrillas attacked with particular brutality everything that the revolution had brought to the people. "They set fire to the buildings of the agrarian reform boards, fire point-blank at girl pupils whom the revolution sent to school, kill peasants who received land from the State . . . and this is being done by- those who pose as champions of the purity of Islam.”

“New Times” said the aims of the counter-revolu-tion were to restore the old order “and plunge the country back into medieval darkness.”

Afghan sources in Moscow, who returned from the Herat area a few days ago, confirmed that there was heavy fighting going on in the region.