Afghanistan Declassified by Brian Glyn Williams

Author:Brian Glyn Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2012-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Ismail Khan, the Amir of Herat

As exile parties in Pakistan were developing, several key commanders began to emerge inside of Afghanistan itself. The first of these was a Tajik toran (captain) named Ismail Khan. Khan was an officer in the Afghan government army who was sent to suppress a rebellion in the western Tajik city of Herat in March 1979. But when he was commanded to fire on his protesting countrymen, he refused to do so. Instead, he attacked the Soviet advisors and their families who had been dispatched by the USSR to assist their Afghan Communist allies. The Soviets and teachers sent by the Communist government were all slaughtered, and the rebels were said to have paraded their decapitated heads through the streets of Herat.

As vengeful Afghan Communist army forces were dispatched to Herat, Khan and his men fled eastward into the Hindu Kush Mountains to wage a guerrilla war. Ismail Khan subsequently became a legend among the Tajik mujahideen in the west for his struggle against the Afghan Communists and Soviet invaders. As a Tajik, he naturally joined the mujahideen party of fellow Tajik Burhanuddin Rabbani (the Jamiat i Islam Party, to which Massoud the Lion of Panjsher had also belonged). But despite his nominal allegiance, Khan, like Massoud, remained largely independent of Rabbani’s leadership. Ismail Khan and other commanders in the field in Afghanistan typically had little respect for party political leaders living safely in exile in Pakistan.

After Ismail Khan’s retreat to the mountains, the Communist government used Soviet-supplied MiGs to bomb Herat. In the process, much of this ancient Silk Road city that had been the capital of the ancient Timurid dynasty of Tamerlane was destroyed. In the ensuing inferno as many as twenty-four thousand Heratis were massacred. But despite his best efforts to come to the aid of the people of Herat, Khan was unable to break out of the mountains and liberate the city, which had a large Communist garrison guarding it.

As a Persian-speaking Tajik, Khan turned to Persian-speaking Iran for assistance, but it should not be forgotten that the Iranians were first and foremost Shiites, whereas Khan was a Sunni. For this reason, the Iranians initially gave only limited assistance to Khan and instead directed most of their aid to the Shiite Hazara factions (although this would later change). The Iranians were always circumspect in their shipment of aid to the anti-Soviet rebels for fear of overly antagonizing their powerful Soviet neighbor and pushing Moscow into the arms of their archenemy, Iraq (Shiite Iran and Socialist-Baathist Iraq were fighting a war of their own at the time).

When the Afghan Communist government of President Najibullah finally collapsed years later in 1992, Ismail Khan seized the oasis of Herat and the surrounding regions and ruled them as an autonomous Jamiat i Islam fiefdom. Although he was a fundamentalist, his rule was nonetheless stable and the region prospered under his control. It is a common myth in the West that all warlords in the 1990s preyed upon their own people and destroyed civil society.

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