Last Soldiers Leave Kabul, Soviets Say

Soviet officials said the last Red Army soldiers in Kabul climbed aboard giant military transport planes and flew home Tuesday night, apparently leaving Afghan armed forces to defend the embattled capital alone for the first time in nine years.

There was no independent confirmation that all Soviet troops had left the city, however.

Just hours before, Muslim guerrillas fired five rockets into Kabul, killing four children and an adult, according to official reports. The airport also was hit for the first time in several weeks.

Kabul Radio said the fatalities occurred after one of the rockets exploded in a bazaar where dozens of people were lining up to buy bread in a city desperately short of supplies.

At the airport, reporters watched as at least 80 Soviet soldiers boarded giant Il-76 planes. Earlier, it had been thought that only about 40 Soviet troops remained in Kabul on the day preceding today’s pullout deadline set under a U.N.-sponsored agreement.

Lt. Col. Pytor Sardarchuk declined to say exactly how many troops were leaving. “All those who are left” were going, he said. Then he turned to watching reporters, shook their hands and said “Goodby.”

Envoys to Remain

About 140 Soviet diplomats and five Soviet journalists planned to stay behind in the capital.

About 5,000 Soviet soldiers remained on Afghan soil on Tuesday, according to the official Tass news agency, out of an estimated 115,000 during the height of Soviet intervention.

Many of those troops were crossing the 1,056-yard-long Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya River into the Soviet border town of Termez, Tass said, after rolling north along the Salang Highway.

The final soldier was to leave Afghanistan by noon today (11 p.m. Tuesday in Los Angeles), Tass added, to comply with the Feb. 15 withdrawal deadline set by the U.N.-mediated accords signed by Afghanistan and Pakistan in April.

“One can count the hours now until the total pullout,” Tass reported.

A ceremony is planned in Termez to mark the end of a war that began with the Soviet intervention in December, 1979, to stabilize a Communist government besieged by Muslim rebels and internal political conflicts.

Lt. Gen. Boris Gromov, 47, commander of Soviet forces in Afghanistan and supervisor of the withdrawal by land, has vowed to be the last soldier out of the country, where at least 1 million Soviet soldiers in all have been involved and 15,000 killed.

Warning Letters

In Kabul, it was generally quiet, but residents said letters--unsigned and delivered the past few nights--warned people to stay off the streets today.

Many residents believed the letters came from the guerrilla forces believed bearing down on the city, but some foreign diplomats suggested that the letters might be the work of the Najibullah government’s secret police.

Written in the local Dari language, the letters warn residents to stay off the streets, close their shops and keep away from the airport.

Meanwhile, three members of a French television crew were expelled from Afghanistan for leaving Kabul without official permission in an attempt to contact U.S.-backed rebel forces.