Fight for Jalalabad Sends More Wounded, Homeless Afghans to Pakistan

For nearly a decade, Atter Bibi and her family refused to give in to the war that has driven 5 million of her countrymen from their homeland. But this week, the killing finally caught up with her.

The 30-year-old Afghan was at her uncle’s wedding party in a mud hut near the strategic eastern city of Jalalabad four days ago when the bombing started. It was part of an offensive by the moujahedeen , the Afghan rebels, that has touched off the bloodiest fighting since the Afghan war began in 1979.

Within hours, Atter Bibi had become part of the newest wave of refugees, adding to what already is the world’s largest refugee population--and at the worst possible time for Pakistan and the relief community to accommodate them.

A cluster bomb scored a direct hit on the wedding party. It killed Atter’s sister-in-law, her mother-in-law and several cousins. It sent shrapnel ripping through Atter’s body, tearing off her right thumb, blowing a hole in her stomach and filling her legs with metal shards.

Wrapped in Gauze

“Yes, it is all so much worse now,” Atter said in a thin voice just above a whisper, as she lay wrapped in post-surgical gauze at a special hospital for war-wounded women in this Pakistani border city. “There is no one left in the village now. They are all either here in Pakistan or dead.”

Still, Atter is among the more than 17,000 lucky ones. They are the Afghans who have survived the past 11 days of rocket and artillery barrages, aerial bombing, mortar fire, missiles, mines, tank attacks and small-arms fire as the moujahedeen battle government forces to a stalemate in their controversial efforts to capture Jalalabad, just 30 miles from the Pakistan border. They are the ones who made it across that border as part of the new refugee flood.

No one knows the number of dead and wounded in what military analysts are calling the decisive battle in the prolonged guerrilla war, but most reliable sources estimate that the total on each side may be as high as 1,000.

The Soviet-backed government of Afghan President Najibullah says that it has killed 2,000 of the moujahedeen guerrillas and their civilian supporters since the rebel offensive began. Rebel commanders concede that their death toll has topped 500. They claim to have killed twice that number, but Najibullah has not issued public figures.

Bloodshed, Little Gain

For all the bloodshed, though, the rebels have gained little. A week ago, they captured the town of Samarkhel, which defense analysts have called “the linchpin to the security of Jalalabad.”

Samarkhel and its garrison fell quickly, with the government troops fleeing so fast that they left behind half-eaten meals, identification cards, love letters, pornographic playing cards, wedding rings, huge stores of ammunition, dozens of heavy artillery pieces and 40 Soviet tanks

But since then, the rebel offensive has stalled. It has become a stalemate of long-range missiles, rockets and artillery duels, in which houses, neighborhoods and entire villages are being flattened and thousands of civilians maimed.

The moujahedeen’s supporters, among them the governments of the United States and Pakistan, have defended the rebels’ strategy of mounting an all-out military offensive against Jalalabad, a steppingstone to the capital of Kabul and a possible site for the rebels’ interim government.

Diplomatic sources say Pakistan’s military intelligence agency pushed the battle plan on the rebels.

“They wanted a big dramatic victory, thinking that it would have a major psychological impact, both on the regime and on the guerrilla forces,” one Western diplomat said of that advice. “After the Feb. 15 Soviet troop pullout, the rebels achieved no major action or accomplishments, and that benefited the regime in Kabul.

“There was a general realization that it’s time to fish or cut bait. The regime in Kabul is not going to just fade away. . . . It (was) going to be a fight, and it (was) time the fighting started.”

Western military analysts added that the timing was critical. The rebels were anxious to take a major city before this week’s meeting of the 46-member Organization of the Islamic Conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in hopes of impressing those governments into officially recognizing the interim government. The rebels have not taken a major city or town in their long guerrilla war.

But that meeting has ended and the moujahedeen came away with half a victory. The Islamic group invited representatives of the rebels to fill Afghanistan’s vacant seat but did not specifically recognize the interim government.

Pakistan, which has taken in more than 3 million Afghan refugees since the war began, now faces the largest wave of such refugees since the early 1980s--and at a time when the international relief community has been shifting its resources away from the refugees to development projects in Afghanistan in preparation for the refugees’ return.

Pakistani officials said this week that as of Thursday, 17,202 new refugees had arrived in the last seven days, most of them having made their way on foot, dodging bombs and rockets. (On Friday, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees in Geneva put the figure of refugees officially registered at the main frontier crossing point since the beginning of March at 11,661. A spokeswoman said a smaller number had crossed the border at other points.)

Some fled the Jalalabad area with nothing but the clothes on their backs. A man who said he was headmaster of a school shook his head as he recalled seeing his sister blown to pieces by a rocket near the Jalalabad airport.

“How can anything be worth this?” he muttered. “All that will be won when it’s over is a pile of rubble.”

Abu Basir, a street vendor from Jalalabad, stepped on one of the millions of land mines now littering the Afghan countryside as he tried to lead his wife, sister and four children to refuge in Pakistan. He was dead on arrival at a Peshawar hospital, and his family squatted in a corner of the hospital, dazed and weeping.

The Pakistani government officially says all new refugees are still welcome here and that there is room for 100,000 more. But privately, officials concede that there is insufficient water and food.

Women in Line for Water

At the old Nasir Bagh refugee camp near Peshawar, where a sprawling new tent city is rising, the camp’s head policeman said Pakistan cannot handle the new wave of refugees. He pointed to a line of more than 100 Afghan women balancing pots on their heads, waiting to collect water from one of the camp’s two water trucks.

“You can see the problem with water,” he said. “This can only get worse. My personal opinion is none of these refugees will leave here for two years at least. And we will continue to get more and more. The world thought the war ended when the Soviets left. We’re beginning to think it has only just begun.”

That’s also how it looks to Alif Khan, 46. The white-bearded farmer was pitching his new tent as he explained how he had become a refugee after nine years of war.

“A bomb fell on my house,” he said, adding that his entire village of Dara Noor, adjacent to Jalalabad, has been leveled. “It was destroyed. So my wife and seven children finally decided to walk to Pakistan.”

Khan, like most of the refugees, cannot go home for months, even if the fighting stops.

“I am a farmer. This is planting season, and I cannot plant. There will be no food, so how will we eat if we go back? We will stay here, maybe a year.”

None of the refugees blamed the moujahedeen for their homelessness. Most said they are rebel supporters who clandestinely helped the rebels inside Afghanistan while pretending to back Najibullah.

“In that sense, it is another setback to the moujahedeen ,” said veteran American aid worker Anne Hurd, head of the Mercy Fund, a Peshawar-based international aid agency that has been funneling food and supplies into Afghanistan in an effort to keep would-be refugees from crossing the border. “From the resistance’s point of view, you are drying up the pond in which the guerrillas swim. And that’s bad. But, from a humanitarian point of view, there is simply nowhere here for these new refugees to go. And that’s a bigger problem.”

Shah Zaman, director of public relations for Pakistan’s refugee commission, said: “It is really a tragic thing that is going on. And the irony is, I fear there will not be a decisive victory. Both sides are now very committed.”

For 9-year-old Abu Sufian, there are no answers--easy or otherwise. He said his house on the outskirts of Jalalabad had been bombed three days earlier, and he has shrapnel wounds in his head and hands. Everyone in his family of nine was injured in the attack.

Did he know who bombed his house?

“The government, the Russians,” he said.

Did he know why?

“Because of the fighting between the moujahedeen and the government.”

But why had his house been hit?

Abu Sufian looked down at his bandaged hands, then he looked up and shook his bandaged head.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Does anybody know?”

CITY UNDER FIRE

The Afghan city of Jalalabad has been the scene of intense fighting between government troops and moujahedeen rebels for the last 11 days. The fighting has driven at least 17,000 refugees over the border into Pakistan.

The garrison town of Samarkhel, which defense analysts call the “linchpin to the security of Jalalabad,” was captured by the rebels last week.