Kabul, Soviets Declare Cease-Fire but Rebels Attack 2 Villages

The Soviet-backed Afghan government began a cease-fire on New Year’s Day, but U.S.-backed Muslim rebels rejected the truce and attacked government troops in two villages, Kabul Radio said.

The cease-fire offer was made Friday by Afghan President Najibullah, and the Soviet Union announced Saturday that its troops would join the truce.

In a televised address to his nation Sunday, Najibullah complained that rebels have expanded operations against his government and repeated his offer of direct talks with them, the official Soviet news agency Tass reported. He also rejected any future Afghan government that excludes the present leadership, Tass said.

The rebels recently opened talks with Soviet representatives.

Guerrillas attacked government troops Sunday in two villages in eastern Nangarahar province, Kabul Radio reported in a broadcast monitored in Islamabad.

The radio said eight guerrillas were killed and seven wounded in the attack on the military posts in Gushta and Deh Bala. It gave no casualty figures for government troops, but it said that soldiers launched mopping-up operations against the rebels after the attack.

Rebel leader Ahmad Shah said the cease-fire was “a condemnable suggestion.”

The seven-party Guerrilla Alliance named Shah head of a provisional Islamic government, that has yet to be installed.

“It only shows how desperate Najib is,” Shah said in a statement issued in Peshawar, Pakistan. “Najib has repeatedly proposed such meaningless cease-fires, but every time we rejected them.”

Rebel spokesman Masood Khalili said of Najibullah’s offer: “We did not start our fight because he asked us to. And we won’t stop because he asked us to.”

Khalili belongs to the Jamaat-i-Islami guerrilla group.

More than 100,000 Soviet soldiers marched into Afghanistan in 1979 to help the Marxist government fight Muslim rebels.

Half the Soviet troops left last year under the terms of a U.N.-brokered accord signed in Geneva by Afghanistan, Pakistan, the United States and the Soviet Union. The rest of the Soviet troops are to withdraw by Feb. 15.