Page 210 - The Winter of Islam and the Spring to Come

THE WINTER OF ISLAM AND THE SPRING TO COME
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Russian reaction. In 1978, Marxist generals in the army and a number of
communist civilians staged a Russian-backed coup. All of Daoud
Khan's family and close associates were slaughtered. The organizers of
the coup announced that they would run the country with a communist
regime, and they also began a fierce war against religion. The Black Book
of Communism describes the communist regime's hatred of religion:
Shortly afterward the government began an antireligious crusade.
The Koran was burned in public, and imams and other religious
leaders were arrested and killed. On the night of 6 January 1979 all
130 men in the Mojaddedi clan, a leading Shiite group, were massa-
cred. All religious practices were banned. 51
The Afghan communists were purely and simply the hired tools of
the Soviet Union. They operated in accordance with the directives of
"advisors" from Moscow, and carried out massacres of their own peo-
ple, as these figures showed them. In the short time they stayed in
power they wreaked frightful terror:

[Afghanistan scholar] Michael Barry describes one such incident: "In
March 1979… 1.700 adults and children, the entire male population
of the village [of Kerala], were all assembled in the town square and
machine-gunned at point-blank range. The dead and dying were
thrown into three mass graves and buried with a bulldozer. For a
while afterward the women could still see the earth move slightly as
the wounded struggled to escape, but soon all movement stopped. All
women fled to Pakistan…" At the same time, terror reigned in Kabul.
The Pol-e-Charki prison, on the eastern outskirts of the city, became a
concentration camp. As Sayyed Abdullah, the director of the prison,
explained to the prisoners: "You're here to be turned into a heap of
rubbish." 52

In his book Le Résistance Afghane (The Afghan Resistance), Michael
Barry describes other brutal practices of the prison governor:
Torture was common; the worst form entailed live burial in the la-
trines. Hundreds of prisoners were killed every night, and the dead
and dying were buried by bulldozers. Stalin's method of punishing
entire ethnic groups for the actions of some of its members was
adopted, leading to the arrest on 15 August 1979 of 300 people from