31 Victims Airlifted Abroad : Children’s Wounds Show Agony of Afghan Conflict

Her face was filled with the horror of war, her body torn apart by its weapons.

But even with her leg bone exposed by the shell that ripped through her as she played on a Kabul street more than seven months ago, 6-year-old Aquila sat in stoic silence Wednesday at the Kabul International Airport.

So did 14-year-old Abdul Farid, who sat beside her. Farid lost his right eye and arm when a land mine blew up in his neighborhood. And there wasn’t so much as a wince out of Abdul Munir, 12, as he recalled the day four months ago that a magnesium flare exploded and burned off his face and hands.

The 31 Afghan children assembled at the airport Wednesday afternoon had a great deal in common. They are all war wounded, innocent victims of one of the world’s longest and most intractable wars. They are all scarred for life because Afghanistan’s medical care, like so much in this impoverished nation, simply cannot cope with the level of human devastation that a nine-year guerrilla war has wrought.

Most of their wounds are old--mistreated or untreated--and more than a third are infected to the very marrow of the bones, just as the Afghan war has eaten into the core of this nation’s next generation.

The 31 children were the fortunate few selected for a medical airlift to West Germany by an apolitical, nonpartisan international aid foundation called Peace Village International.

“We don’t care about the politics--whoever is going to rule this country, we don’t care,” said Dr. Eberhard Thoma, the German physician who had spent 10 days in Kabul examining and selecting the children most in need of treatment abroad. “We believe only that these children are wounded. We don’t care by whom they were wounded or why.”

The individual tragedies assembled on Afghan Airlines Flight 314 Wednesday offered only a glimpse of this war, but they represent the stark human side of the conflict that has raged relentlessly since even before Soviet troops were sent into Afghanistan in the winter of 1979. It is a perspective that has been all but lost in the recent weeks of political maneuvering as the Soviets approach their final week of a U.N.-mediated troop withdrawal that began last May.

Until recently, most of the horror stories of the war have come out of the Pakistani border city of Peshawar, the headquarters for 3.2 million Afghan refugees who have fled the fighting.

The families of Aquila, Abdul Farid and Abdul Munir did not flee. They remained in this beleaguered capital throughout the rocket and artillery barrages, the mining operations and the urban guerrilla attacks of the U.S.-backed moujahedeen , the Afghans fighting the Soviet troops and the Moscow-backed Afghan government. In fact, war is all that most of these children have ever known--war and the shortages that it has produced in a nation that already ranked among the world’s three poorest.

“For each child, the story is basically the same,” Thoma said. “They were on their way to school or out playing. They were in the street. They were in the house. They were in a bus, and that was it. Something exploded, and they were injured by coincidence.”

The stories are always compounded by Afghanistan’s crushing poverty.

“I’ve seen things in the past 10 days in Afghanistan that I have never in my life seen--and hope I never see again,” Thoma said in an interview on the flight out of Kabul. “There simply isn’t enough of anything here.

“I’ve seen compound fractures that couldn’t be set because there is no plaster of Paris. I’ve seen raw bones left exposed for months because there was nothing to wrap them with. I’ve seen the small feet and arms of children grown deformed because there was nothing to set them with. And almost always, the neglect has resulted in bone marrow infections. It is just such a poor country, you cannot imagine.”

Thoma added, however, that the lifelong poverty has hardened the children now under his care.

“Maybe it is because they have so little that they expect so little and are so calm about what this war has done to them,” he said.

Still, it is against this backdrop of poverty that, after the last Soviet soldier leaves Kabul, the embattled Afghan government will wage war against the Islamic guerrillas, who have received $2 billion in arms, ammunition and supplies from the United States.

And it is because of this poverty that the parents of the 31 war-wounded children agreed to entrust them to the German aid mission for long-term care and repair.

Thoma said that most of the children will remain at hospitals or at the peace village complex in Oberhausen, West Germany, for six months to a year to undo the damage. Bones will be reset, marrow infections will be treated with antibiotics, a rare commodity in Kabul, and plastic surgeons and prosthetic experts will attempt to repair or replace the scarred, incinerated skin and amputated limbs.

“In every case, though, these children will be returned to Afghanistan when they are well, no matter what group is in power,” Thoma said. “These are not refugees. These are innocent children. How can innocent children have an ideology? And yet it’s always the innocent, the children and the civilians, who suffer most from war.”

Mark Fineman reported this story while trying to enter Afghanistan but was forced by Afghan authorities to return to New Delhi.