#soviet war

[morbidology]

The Motherland Monument in Kiev, Ukraine. Inside, there’s a museum as well as a memorial hall displaying marble plaques with the names of more than 11,600 soldiers and over 200 workers of the home-front honoured during the war with the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union and the Hero of Socialist Labor.

[canvas4everyone]

Steel that angles like it’s learning to dodge A diesel engine humming under all that history 2mm of straight up problem solving Tracks built for mud, snow, and long days And somehow it still fits the moment WWII turns What made it so hard to stop numbers, design, or both? Peek at the choices behind the legend.

[firstdraftpublishing]

David Kilcullen on 'Kandahar Assassins'

Author of 'Counterinsurgency', 'Out of the Mountains' and 'The Accidental Guerilla', David Kilcullen wrote the introduction to First Draft Publishing's latest book, Kandahar Assassins. He explains how learning about the 1980s war against the Soviet Union - and the tactics employed by the mujahedeen fighters - are essential to understanding the present-day conflict in Afghanistan.

The Pashtun word cherik can mean both “guerrilla” and “assassin.”  Mohammed Gumnam 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 Gumnam’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, Gumnam 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 Gumnam 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. Gumnam 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. Gumnam 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.

Gumnam’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 Gumnam 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 Gumnam 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, Gumnam’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 Gumnam 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. Gumnam’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 Gumnam’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 is available for purchase in paperback and electronic formats now. For more information and links to buy, visit our website.

[watanafghanistan]

Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story (book)

Drafted into the Soviet Army in April 1984 and sent at the age of 19 to serve in Afghanistan as a minesweeper, Vladislav Tamarov turned in secret to the pen and the camera to chronicle his 621 days of war. Photographs depicting the haunted faces of both soldiers and civilians, the country's ragged yet beautiful mountain terrain, and the banality of daily life between missions and interspersed with Tamarov's unsentimental but passionate prose, in which he reveals his growing disorientation and assails his government's folly for engaging in a campaign that has been widely dubbed "the Soviet Vietnam."

this memoir is not a cry for help or a pity-me-I’m-a-vet type of story. It is not a tale of heroism and triumph against an indomitable foe. It is simply an organized recollection of photographs and notes that a 19-year-old boy took while he was at war with an enemy he did not hate . . . in a country he did not care about . . . for a government that did not care about him.

[watanafghanistan]

[lesdisquesperdus-blog]

Soviet War - "Nuthouse" [1983]

[clydeoscope]

TRUE STORY ftw.

Who Was He?

Simo Hayha had a fairly boring life in Finland. He served his one mandatory year in the military, and then became a farmer. But when the Soviet Union invaded his homeland in 1939, he decided he wanted to help his country.

Since the majority of fighting took place in the forest, he figured the best way to stop the invasion was to grab his trusty rifle, a couple of cans of food and hide in a tree all day shooting Russians. In six feet of snow. And 20-40 degrees below zero.

Of course when the Russians heard that dozens of their men were going down and that it was all one dude with a rifle, they got fucking scared. He became known as "The White Death" because of his white camouflage outfit, and they actually mounted whole missions just to kill that one guy.

They started by sending out a task force to find Hayha and take him out. He killed them all.

Then they tried getting together a team of counter-snipers (which are basically snipers that kill snipers) and sent them in to eliminate Hayha. He killed all of them, too.

Over the course of 100 days, Hayha killed 542 people with his rifle. He took out another 150 or so with his SMG, sending his credited kill-count up to 705.

Since everyone they had was either too dead or too scared to go anywhere near him, the Russians just carpet-bombed everywhere they thought he might be. Supposedly, they had the location right, and he actually got hit by a cloud of shrapnel that tore his coat up, but didn't actually hurt him, because he's the fucking White Death, damn it.

Finally on March 6th, 1940, some lucky bastard shot Hayha in the head with an exploding bullet. When some other soldiers found him and brought him back to base, he "had half his head missing." The White Death had finally been stopped...

...for about a week. In spite of having come down with a nasty case of shot-in-the-face syndrome, he was still very much alive, and regained consciousness on March 13, the very day the war ended.