Soldiers of God (23 page)

A confidant of the guerrilla leader said, “Haq knew that for such people to succeed they needed to live in nice houses in nice neighborhoods … like Chardihi, south of the city … and have nice cars and nice clothes, so they would look like people who had enough money to bribe their way out of the army and would never be stopped or suspected by the police. He also knew that such groups of people may go months at a time doing nothing at all for the network, yet still had to be maintained, still encouraged, still given pep talks … and still
paid.”

The short time Haq was in Nangarhar before starting the front in Kabul, he had established a rudimentary network in Jalalabad that he had turned over to “Engineer” Mahmoud (another Khalis commander). Mahmoud did nothing with it: never contacted the people, never paid them. So that underground fell apart and Haq got very angry at him. The other mujahidin, including other top Khalis commanders, had no concept of what a network was all about.

Intelligence work took a good deal of money, since operatives had to be paid. Haq, because he was a clear thinker, was a good talker and persuader. With the coming of the Soviets, his reputation as a brawler and young rebel was suddenly converted into hard currency as someone with experience at what the Afghans needed most. So the money came. It came from
Haq's friends’ fathers who were merchants and traders. It came from Abdul Qadir, more sympathetic to Haq than Din Mohammed, who ran a smuggling network between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And it came from a handful of wealthy, patriotic families willing to give money rather than fight or lose their business with the Communist government.

In July 1980 the BBC reported that a large number of mujahidin were harassing the Soviets in Paghman, west of the capital. “There were only thirteen of us in Paghman,” Haq told me. “The rest were in houses in Kabul. The BBC exaggerated, but it felt great. It felt like we were really doing something.” The same month Haq took shrapnel in the head and returned to Pakistan for the first time since he had argued with his oldest brother and Khalis. (It was the first of many shrapnel wounds Haq would suffer. In the mid-1980s, when he traveled abroad to meet President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, the fragments in his body set off airport metal detectors.)

“I shouted at my brother. I was very rude. I was supposed to respect him but I didn't. I was full of pride because I had proved him wrong. Hizb-i-Islami asked me to come to the headquarters. I refused. Khalis called me. I shouted at him too. Then one day I was sitting on a carpet drinking tea with Qadir when Khalis came into the room and sat down. I didn't say hello to him. He grabbed me hard and shouted at me and told me not to be so proud. He admitted he had been wrong about me. I agreed to go with him for two days up to Swat [a mountain valley and resort area in northern Pakistan]. It was my first vacation since I was a child. I felt better. That was when Khalis said, ‘All right, whatever you need, the party will help you.’ “

Haq gradually built up an underground network of several hundred safe houses involving thousands of Kabul citizens, who with little advance warning could distribute leaflets throughout the city within hours. And this was in addition to the seven thousand fighters Haq had in Paghman and the other
mountain regions overlooking the capital. Haq pioneered the technique of using dummy mujahidin convoys as decoys to ambush Soviet armored troops. He taught his men how to hold their rocket fire until the helicopter gunships were practically on top of them. Wherever he moved in the mountains around “Russian Kabulistan,” he sent out lateral … as well as forward and backward … patrols to make certain he himself was never ambushed. Any of his men who wasted ammunition shooting at birds or other wild game … an Afghan tradition … had their rifles confiscated. Mujahidin who aroused his wrath often got his big, hairy fist in their face. Haq was still very much the little devil who had smacked the teacher. His short fuse made him at once feared, loved, hated, and respected.

Haq's underground units made their reputation with the kidnapping in Kabul of General Yevgeny Nikolaivich Akhrimiyuk, a relative of the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. General Akhrimiyuk was reported to be the head of the KGB in Afghanistan during the Daoud era and, in 1983 when he was captured, was one of the senior advisers to the Afghan puppet ruler Babrak Karmal … though officially he just advised the government “on geology.”

General Akhrimiyuk's Afghan driver of four years secretly worked for Zabet Halim, the police officer who defected to Haq when the latter first organized the Kabul front. One morning, the driver picked up the general outside the entrance of the Ministry of Mines and Industry in Kabul and headed for the airport to meet the general's wife, arriving that day from the Soviet Union. On the way, the driver casually asked the general if it would be all right to give his brother a lift to the bus station, since his brother had to go to Jalalabad. General Akhrimiyuk said no, it would not be all right. The driver expected this and had thought of something else.

The driver mentioned to the general that he had accidentally left the trunk open. Before the general could protest, the driver pulled over to the side of the road on a street near the
Ministry of Defense. As the driver got out to close the trunk, another man jumped into the car through the open door and pointed a cocked pistol at the general's head. The driver, who had not left the trunk open at all, quickly got back into the car and drove out of the city, to a rendezvous with Haq's men in Paghman. After three days there, they took General Akhrimiyuk to an area bordering Pakistan, where they held him for eight months.

There was talk of exchanging him for fifty of Khalis's mujahidin being held prisoner in Kabul. But as the talks stalled, Haq said he began to feel a little sorry for the general, who was old, sick, and had been badly wounded in an antipersonnel mine explosion during World War II. General Akhrimiyuk whimpered constantly about his wife and family, but despite continued questioning, stuck to his cover, refusing to discuss anything except “gas and petroleum.” The mujahidin allowed the general to write a letter to a high-level Soviet official, begging him to negotiate a release, but nothing happened.

“I was always against torture,” Haq said to me. “And this guy was old. I went to Strasbourg, where I told the European Parliament that we don't kill prisoners. Then I picked up a newspaper and read that my party had killed him. It was Khalis who ordered him killed. I got really mad at Khalis but he just said, ‘He was dying anyway.’ I should never have let Akhrimiyuk get out of my hands. They held him for months and didn't even get any information out of him. What did I have him kidnapped for?”

Within Afghanistan and among the Afghan refugee community on the Northwest Frontier, Abdul Haq's reputation grew. On November 21, 1985, Dr. Najib replaced Babrak Karmal as Afghanistan's Communist ruler, and Haq faced a new challenge. Najib, born in 1946, was almost twenty years younger than Karmal, more lethal, and more dynamic. A medical doctor trained in security work by the KGB, and head of KhAD
from 1980 to 1985, Najib had been described by the Afghan prime minister at the time, Sultan Ali Keshtmand, as a “strong and penetrating weapon of the Revolution.” Najib, more than any other Afghan, was responsible for making KhAD the feared and effective enterprise it was. Under his command, KhAD grew into a force of twenty-five thousand, with a budget larger than that of the Afghan regular army. KhAD took over all aspects of the arrest and interrogation of political prisoners, with the jurisdiction of the police restricted to common criminals.

As soon as he replaced Karmal, Najib … who would later change his name to Najibullah
(ullah
means “of God”) in an attempt to gain religious support … made a whirlwind tour of the government-controlled areas of the country, making resolute statements about “national reconciliation.” Despite the bullish, thuggish caricature the West had of him, Najib was more than just a secret police heavy. He was a talented political survivor, far more deft than any of his Communist predecessors in juggling the carrot of reconciliation and better economic conditions with the stick of absolute terror against the mujahidin and those who supported them.

“Najib was moving very fast,” Haq explained. “It was crucial that I break his spell quickly, to show the citizens of Kabul that he was just another Soviet puppet, no better than the previous ones at controlling the mujahidin.”

The last half of 1986 was to be the most spectacular season of Haq's career as an urban guerrilla. Those months solidified his reputation as one of the big three mujahidin commanders in all of Afghanistan, along with the more senior Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Panjshir Valley and Ismael Khan in Herat. Only Haq, however, had his main base of support inside the Afghan capital.

The first of his targets during that time was the Sarobi dam and power station, which supplied Kabul with much of its electricity. Haq's planning started in late June, seven months
after Najib had taken power. “I had lots of problems just to get over the mountains north and east of Kabul. The dam was protected by minefields and deliberate flooding. The bridge over the Kabul River and all the trails leading to the bridge were patrolled by government troops. We moved only at night. Everybody had to closely follow the man in front of him so only the lead man … who knew the trail well … was threatened by mines. We used layers of cloth and foam to cushion the horses’ hooves so they wouldn't make noise and alert the soldiers. We walked for several nights like this. Because we had to travel light, we carried only tea, cucumbers, and some bread to eat.

“When we were a day and a half from the dam we stopped and sent out a recon team. They returned after three days without enough information. I got mad and sent out another team. Three more days went by before the second team returned to tell me we needed at least a thousand kilos of plastique to really do the job. Great. I had looked everywhere just to find two hundred fifty kilos.

“Next we had to clear a path through a minefield. We worked for twelve nights, from eight in the evening to three in the morning. I used a pocketknife, dragging it gently over the dirt. When the knife hit metal you heard a click and chills went up and down your back all the way from your fingernail … it was a mine. Every night we advanced another ten meters.”

Destroying the dam with 250 kilos of explosive was impossible. So Haq decided to put all of it in one place, a control room near the top of the dam. Getting in was easy: it was the only one of three control rooms that was empty and unguarded. After the minefield, security at the dam site itself was like everything else in Afghanistan … a mess.

The July 20, 1986, explosion did not destroy the dam, but it wrecked the control room, the bridge atop the dam, and the machine for lifting the gate of the dam. It also cracked
one of the three pylons supporting the dam and killed about a dozen technicians and government soldiers. It plunged the city of Kabul into darkness that night and caused minor flooding in the surrounding area. For three months, until the dam was completely repaired, sporadic power blackouts plagued the capital. The damage was estimated at over $2 million.

Less than six weeks later, at ten in the evening on August 27, 1986, Abdul Haq struck again. His men blew up the ammunition dump at Qarga, west of the capital, the headquarters of the Afghan Eighth Army Division and the single largest Soviet munitions depot in the country. A massive fireball rose over a thousand feet into the air, and the concussions that followed made windows vibrate throughout Kabul. Smaller explosions continued into the morning.

Haq and his men set off the explosion with only two 107 mm Chinese-made rockets, mounted on crossed sticks and attached to two taped wires hooked up to a plunger. But the planning took three weeks.

“I had to find out exactly where the ammo dump was on the base,” Haq said. “We didn't have aerial photographs, which meant we had to find out from contacts in the Afghan army. Then I had to measure the distance to a launch site, since all we had were four rockets that weren't guided by radar.” Finding a launch site was difficult because the free-flight range of a 107 mm rocket is only about two miles before it starts angling. There was no place that close to the dump that was very far from a government post.

“I sent out ten people to walk the distance, counting their steps in their heads. They all came back with different numbers. I added them all up, divided by ten, and went with the average. I had four rockets. All I really needed was one hit.

“Because government posts were all around, we couldn't just set up a rocket launcher. We needed diversions.” So Haq's men initiated small attacks on government posts in the
Paghman region near Qarga. “When there was shooting everywhere, we brought in the rockets.”

The first two missed the target. Then his men fired the second two, and still nothing happened. Later, black smoke started to rise in the distance. “The black turned to green, and then to bright yellow, lighting the whole sky. We were five miles away, but it was difficult to breathe because of the smoke. I was scared and laughing at the same time. ‘Oh, my God,’ I said to myself. ‘What did I do?’

“We ran away. Everybody was watching the blasts. Nobody noticed us.”

The Qarga base reportedly housed a number of surface-to-air missiles, and Haq suspected that these caused the huge yellow fireball. He took color photographs of it and hung them in his office. Haq had tipped off a British diplomat in Kabul who had a video camera. He recorded the explosion from the roof of the British embassy; the video made the rounds in Peshawar in 1987.

What Haq did not do was take one of the handful of television cameramen resident in Peshawar with him on the operation. This allowed several other mujahidin groups and commanders also active in the Kabul area to claim credit for the Qarga blast. And a British documentary highlighting the exploits of Ahmad Shah Massoud included the video footage of the Qarga explosion without mentioning Haq's name. In the rumor-filled, conspiracy-ridden atmosphere of Peshawar, and in the American Club and the Bamboo Garden in particular, different stories emerged about how the attack was actually carried out. One hyped version had it that mujahidin had dispatched trucks filled with plastique to crash through the gate of the army base protecting the ammunition dump. When Haq claimed that he was responsible for the blast, and did it with 107 mm rockets, most people … given his reputation … believed him.