Raids inside Soviet union during Soviet Afghan war | |||||||
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Part of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan and Operation Cyclone | |||||||
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Belligerents | |||||||
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Units involved | |||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
1 Train destroyed 1 Factory destroyed 1 bridge destroyed Several barges destroyed One airfield damaged Unknown killed | Unknown |
The raids inside Soviet Union during Soviet Afghan War were an effort to foment unrest and rebellion by the Islamic populations of the Soviet Union, starting in late 1984 Director of CIA William Casey encouraged Mujahideen militants to mount sabotage raids inside the Soviet Union, according to Robert Gates, Casey's executive assistant and Mohammed Yousef, the Pakistani ISI brigadier general who was the chief for Afghan operations. The rebels began cross-border raids into the Soviet Union in spring 1985. [1] [2] [3]
In August 1985 Afghan Mujahideen bombed a Soviet military airbase in Krasnovodsk, Turkmenistan. Three soldiers were killed. [2]
In January 1987 a bomb exploded on a Moscow-bound train in northwestern Uzbekistan, killing 3 citizens. The attack was likely meant to target Soviet troops. [2]
In April 1987 three separate teams of Afghan rebels were directed by the ISI to launch coordinated raids on multiple targets across the Soviet border and extending, in the case of an attack on an Uzbek factory, as deep as over 16 kilometres (10 mi) into Soviet territory. [4]
One of the most notable attacks launched by the Mujahideen inside the Soviet Union was the 1988 attack on the town of Kushka. The Afghan Mujahideen captured the town and held it for several days before being forced to withdraw. [2]
Pakistan's ISI requested limpet mines from Britain in the hope of attacking Soviet transport barges on the South bank of the Amu Darya River. MI6 facilitated the attacks which included the Limpets. In this they were successful in destroying a number of barges as well as damaging the bridge pylons spanning the river near Termez. [5]
The Soviet paratroopers found that the Afghan mujaheddin actually wore the black uniforms with rectangular black-yellow-red stripes, and suspected to be Pakistan Army Special Service Group personnel; Pakistan's government has officially denied their involvement. The American author, Aukai Collins, identified the elements as "Black Storks" who crossed the border to join the Afghan mujahideen – a claim also backed by American author, David Campbell.: 60–61 [6]
CIA director William Casey secretly visited Pakistan numerous times to meet with the ISI officers managing the mujahideen, [7] and personally observed the guerrillas training on at least one occasion. [8] Coll reports that
Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing that they take the Afghan war into enemy territory—into the Soviet Union itself. Casey wanted to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan to the Soviet Union's predominantly Muslim southern republics. The Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied thousands of Korans, as well as books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan and tracts on historical heroes of Uzbek nationalism, according to Pakistani and Western officials. [8]
CIA also supplied Mujahideen with Weapons and Ammunition as well as Financial aid and this proved to be a crucial factor in the success of these raids.
The UK's role in the Soviet Afghan war entailed direct military involvement not only in Afghanistan but the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union. [9] From 1984 in conjunction with the CIA and ISI, MI6 helped organize and execute "scores" of guerrilla-style attacks. These included rocket attacks on villages in Tajikistan and raids on Soviet airfields, troop supplies and convoys in Uzbekistan which flowed through these areas, some 25 kilometers in these territories. [10]
These were the first direct Western attacks on the Soviet Union since the 1950s and they reached their peak in 1986. [11] MI6 directly remitted money into an account of Pakistani leader of Jamaat-e-Islami Qazi Hussain Ahmad who had close links with Hekmatyar & Massoud. MI6's aim was for Ahmad to spread radical and anti-Soviet Islamic literature in the Soviet republics in the hope of rebellions against their Communist governments. These went as far as Chechnya and Bosnia. [12] The uprisings did not occur but the Soviets were concerned about potential uprisings during the war and even threatened retaliation with bombings in Pakistan. [10]
The Mujahideen attacks inside the Soviet Union had a significant impact on the Soviet war effort. The attacks forced the Soviet Union to divert resources away from the front lines and to focus on protecting its borders. The attacks also damaged the morale of the Soviet troops and contributed to the Soviet decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989.
Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Afghan military leader and politician. He was a guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation during the Soviet–Afghan War from 1979 to 1989. In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias; after the Taliban takeover, he was the leading opposition commander against their regime until his assassination in 2001.
Tora Bora is a cave complex, part of the Spin Ghar mountain range of eastern Afghanistan. It is situated in the Pachir Aw Agam District of Nangarhar, approximately 50 kilometres west of the Khyber Pass and 10 km (6 mi) north of the border of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan. Tora Bora and the surrounding Spin Ghar range had natural caverns formed by streams eating into the limestone, that had later been expanded into a CIA-financed complex built for the Afghan mujahideen. Tora Bora was known to be a stronghold location of the Afghan mujahideen, used by military forces against the Soviet Union during the 1980s.
The Soviet–Afghan War was a protracted armed conflict fought in the Soviet-controlled Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) from 1979 to 1989. The war was a major conflict of the Cold War as it saw extensive fighting between Soviet Union, the DRA and allied paramilitary groups against the Afghan mujahideen and their allied foreign fighters. While the mujahideen were backed by various countries and organizations, the majority of their support came from Pakistan, the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Iran, and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. The involvement of the foreign powers made the war a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Combat took place throughout the 1980s, mostly in the Afghan countryside. The war resulted in the deaths of approximately 3,000,000 Afghans, while millions more fled from the country as refugees; most externally displaced Afghans sought refuge in Pakistan and in Iran. Approximately 6.5% to 11.5% of Afghanistan's erstwhile population of 13.5 million people is estimated to have been killed over the course of the conflict. The Soviet–Afghan War caused grave destruction throughout Afghanistan and has also been cited by scholars as a significant factor that contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, formally ending the Cold War. It is also commonly referred to as "the Soviet Union's Vietnam".
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is an Afghan politician, and former mujahideen leader and drug trafficker. He is the founder and current leader of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin political party, so called after Mohammad Yunus Khalis split from Hezbi Islami in 1979 to found Hezb-i Islami Khalis. He twice served as Prime Minister during the 1990s.
The Inter-Services Intelligence is the largest and best-known component of the Pakistani intelligence community. It is responsible for gathering, processing, and analyzing any information from around the world that is deemed relevant to Pakistan's national security. The ISI reports to its director-general and is primarily focused on providing intelligence to the Pakistani government.
Abdul Haq was an Afghan mujahideen commander who fought against the Soviet-backed People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the de facto Afghan government in the 1980s. He was killed by the Taliban in October 2001 while trying to create a popular uprising against the Taliban in Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11th attacks.
The 1989–1992 Afghan Civil War, also known as the FirstAfghan Civil War, took place between the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the end of the Soviet–Afghan War on 15 February 1989 until 27 April 1992, ending the day after the proclamation of the Peshawar Accords proclaiming a new interim Afghan government which was supposed to start serving on 28 April 1992.
Afghan Arabs are Arab and other Muslim Islamist mujahideen who came to Afghanistan during and following the Soviet–Afghan War to aid the war efforts of native Muslims in the DRA. Despite being called "Afghan" they were not from Afghanistan nor legally citizens of Afghanistan.
Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The mujahideen were also supported by Britain's MI6, who conducted their own separate covert actions. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties, that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Soviet-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan administration since before the Soviet intervention.
The Afghan mujahideen were Islamist resistance groups that fought against the Republic of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union during the Soviet–Afghan War and the subsequent First Afghan Civil War.
Several sources have alleged that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had ties with Osama bin Laden's faction of "Afghan Arab" fighters when it armed Mujahideen groups to fight the Soviet Union during the Soviet–Afghan War.
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, abbreviated as Ghost Wars, is a book written by Steve Coll, published in 2004 by Penguin Press. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
The Afghanistan conflict began in 1978 and has coincided with several notable operations by the United States (U.S.) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first operation, code-named Operation Cyclone, began in mid-1979, during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter. It financed and eventually supplied weapons to the anti-communist mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan following an April 1978 coup by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and throughout the nearly ten-year military occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.). Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, supported an expansion of the Reagan Doctrine, which aided the mujahideen along with several other anti-Soviet resistance movements around the world.
Pakistan's principal intelligence and covert action agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has historically conducted a number of clandestine operations in its western neighbor, Afghanistan. ISI's covert support to militant jihadist insurgent groups in Afghanistan, the Pashtun-dominated former Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Kashmir has earned it a wide reputation as the primary progenitor of many active South Asian jihadist groups.
During the Soviet–Afghan War, there was a large amount of foreign involvement. The Afghan mujahidin were backed primarily by Pakistan, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom making it a Cold War proxy war. Pakistani forces trained the mujahidin rebels while the U.S. and Saudi Arabia offered the greatest financial support. However, private donors and religious charities throughout the Muslim world—particularly in the Persian Gulf—raised considerably more funds for the Afghan rebels than any foreign government; Jason Burke recounts that "as little as 25 per cent of the money for the Afghan jihad was actually supplied directly by states." Saudi Arabia was heavily involved in the war effort and matched the United States' contributions dollar-for-dollar in public funds. Saudi Arabia also gathered an enormous amount of money for the Afghan mujahidin in private donations that amounted to about $20 million per month at their peak. Other countries that supported the Mujahideen were Egypt, China, West Germany, France, Turkey, Japan and even Israel, Iran on the other hand only supported the Shia Mujahideen, namely the Persian speaking Shiite Hazaras in a limited way. One of these groups was the Tehran Eight, a political union of Afghan Shi'a. They were supplied predominately by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but Iran's support for the Hazaras nevertheless frustrated efforts for a united Mujahidin front.
Though not officially a belligerent during the Soviet–Afghan War, the United Kingdom was heavily involved, playing a key covert role in the conflict. Also known as the Second Great Game, the British provided both indirect and direct support for the Afghan mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet Union, including secretly arming, funding and supplying various factions. Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) primarily supported the Mujahideen group Jamiat-e Islami, commanded by Ahmad Shah Massoud who, having received little support from the US and Pakistan, became Britain's key ally in the conflict. Fighting in the Panjshir valley, Massoud and his fighters with British support and intelligence, overcame nine Soviet offensives and held out up to the Soviet withdrawal from the vital valley in 1986. Massoud became the most successful and feared out of any of the Mujahideen commanders.
The Second Battle of Zhawar was a significant engagement that took place during the Soviet-Afghan War. It pitted Afghan Army units, supported by the Soviet Union, against mujahideen faction led by Jalaluddin Haqqani. The objective of the battle was to destroy the mujahideen's logistical base located in Zhawar, just three kilometers from the Durand Line.
The following is an outline of English language Wikipedia articles related to Pakistan's military history from 1947.
Pakistan–Soviet/DRA aerial conflict refers to the Soviet Air Forces and the Afghan Air Force occasionally crossing into Pakistani airspace to target Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan where refugees were being armed, dissuade the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) from supporting the Afghan mujahideen and to block their supply routes. To counter the Soviet-Afghan jets, the United States began providing F-16 jets to Pakistan. These F-16 jets lacked the capability to fire radar-guided beyond-visual range missiles, and thus they were required to get close to their opponents to use their AIM-9P and more advanced AIM-9L Sidewinder heat-seeking or their 20-millimeter Vulcan cannons.
The KhAD-KGB campaign in Pakistan was a joint campaign in which the Afghan KhAD’s foreign "Tenth Directorate" and the Soviet KGB targeted Pakistan using prostitution spy rings, terror attacks, hijackings, serial killings, assassinations and the dissemination of propaganda to dissuade Pakistan from supporting the Afghan mujahideen.