Fleeing winds of war in valley of despair

Deadly games: children in Afghanistan's Panjsher Valley, seeking refuge from the civil war, play in a tank left from the 1978 Soviet invasion. Reuters photo

Saturday, December 11, 1999

South China Morning Post

SAYED SALAHUDDIN of REUTERS in The Panjsher Valley

Soraya's home is a piece of plastic. One end is tied to a gutted Russian tank, the other is nailed to the ground.

The 62-year-old woman sought shelter at a disused military camp in the Panjsher Valley after fleeing fighting between the ruling Taleban and the forces of opposition leader General Ahmad Shah Masood.

"We became so awfully tired that we chose to use this [base] as our abode," Soraya said this week as a United Nations aid convoy from Kabul carrying wheat and winter clothing for children reached thousands of victims of Afghanistan's civil war.

The aid was part of a planned 5,000 tonnes the United Nations hopes to send to the valley to help 65,000 displaced people.

They are anxious for food. Some say they have not eaten properly since they fled the Shomali plains north of Kabul after the Taleban unleashed its summer offensive to drive General Masood's fighters from the capital.

Not far away, another woman used a cannon to support her makeshift shelter against the bitter winter winds which blow through the valley beneath the Hindu Kush mountains.

Women, some in tears, told of their flight and of the fate that befell their loved ones and their homes on the Shomali plains, a rich farming area now lying untended.

The Taleban said it chased fighters from the area and had to destroy houses and irrigation dykes to stop them being used in a Masood counter-offensive, but deny accusations it used a scorched earth policy in pursuit of the last major force opposing the imposition of its purist Islamic rule.

"I lost my husband and three sons in the fighting. I am left with no one to support me except God," said one woman, wiping away tears with her scarf.

"We had no option but to leave our house when the Taleban gave us the ultimatum to leave or be forced to do so," said Jamila, a teacher. "It was as if doomsday had arrived."

More than 120,000 Afghan refugees have returned home this year despite the turmoil in the central Asian nation, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees office announced yesterday.

But Afghans still constitute the world's largest bloc of refugees, with around 2.6 million registered in neighbouring countries, and up to two million more eking out a living in Pakistan's main cities.