Cold War Incursion Sows Seeds of Terror

A fierce wind blew down from the barren Khwaja Amran mountains, whipping up a stinging sandstorm, so Maulvi Abdul Samad and his band of fighters, some only in their teens, took shelter in a crumbling house. They sat on the floor of pounded earth, cradled their assault rifles in their arms and shared slabs of unleavened bread. The fighters listened with silent respect as Samad, their fork-bearded elder, spoke of what more than a decade and a half of warfare had taught him.

“How can you conceive that a country that was almost nothing smashed the world’s greatest power, the Soviet Union, into pieces?” asked the former commander of moujahedeen (Muslim holy warriors) in a district of Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. “Yes, people did give us dollars and Stinger missiles. But who can use them? Only God.

“The Soviet Union, which was a superpower, is now gone,” he went on, the awe evident in his voice. “It is the Afghan nation and land that is now the superpower.”

The superpower--or, as some say, the monster that has turned against those who thought they could master it.

It has been more than seven years since the pullout of the last of the 110,000 Soviet troops from Afghanistan and four years since the collapse of the Kremlin-backed puppet regime of President Najibullah in Kabul. Yet the consequences and side effects of the Afghan War and its aftermath are still making themselves felt.

From this remote, landlocked and war-ruined Asian nation, weapons and the battle-hardened men to use them have ranged as far afield as Kashmir and the Balkans.

Thousands of young men from throughout the Islamic world who flocked to Afghanistan and underwent military training or participated in combat here have sown a whirlwind of terror that has buffeted Asia, Europe, Africa and North America.

In an investigation conducted over four continents and focused on some of the individuals whose lives were forever altered by their experiences here, The Times has found that from Morocco to Manila to Manhattan, governments and law enforcement officials have confronted these unforeseen consequences of the Afghan conflict:

* Terrorism and insurrection.

* Networks of Muslim extremists that for the first time transcend national boundaries.

* Inflamed and expansionist Islamic radicalism.

New Generation of Militants

In countries as diverse as Algeria, Bosnia-Herzegovina and France, alumni of the Afghan War also have helped spawn a new generation of militant Islamists and terrorists.

“We have created a monster,” summarized Nabil Osman, director of the state Information Service in Egypt, one of the largest suppliers of Arab volunteers to the Muslim holy war waged in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

Their involvement in Afghanistan has even boomeranged against the old Cold War adversaries who used one of this continent’s poorest lands as an arena for battle. The Kremlin poured in tanks and troops; the United States spent billions of dollars to equip and train anti-Communist insurgents in the 1980s.

When, for example, terrorists on June 25 used a mammoth truck bomb to demolish an eight-story barracks at the King Abdulaziz Air Base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. airmen and wounding more than 250 others, suspicion immediately fell on Islamic radicals trained in Afghanistan.

“Recently we have seen growth in ‘transnational’ groups comprised of fanatical Islamic extremists, many of whom fought in Afghanistan and now drift to other countries with the aim of establishing anti-Western, fundamentalist regimes by destabilizing traditional governments and attacking U.S. and Western targets,” Gen. J. H. Binford Peay, head of the U.S. Central Command, told hearings last month of the Senate Armed Services Committee looking into the Dhahran bombing.

On Nov. 13, five Americans died when a white pickup truck stuffed with explosives detonated outside a three-story building in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

The terrorists’ target was a U.S. Army program that provides military and civilian advisors to train the Saudi national guard. Three of the four Saudi militants arrested for that attack admitted to having received firearms and explosives training in Afghanistan and to having participated in combat here.

“We were planning on carrying out similar operations, but we were arrested,” Abdul-Aziz Fahd Nasser, 24, said in a televised confession. On May 31, he and his accomplices were beheaded; fellow militants vowed to avenge their deaths.

Repercussions of the Afghan conflict had reached the United States even earlier. A van crammed with explosives was driven into the parking garage under the twin 110-story towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan on Feb. 26, 1993. When it exploded, it killed six people, injured 1,000 and caused half a billion dollars in damage.

The “hands-on ringleader” of this blow at the heart of the American financial system, U.S. investigators found, was a Brooklyn taxi driver from Egypt who fought in the Afghan War against the Soviets. The cabby, Mahmud Abouhalima, has been sentenced to 240 years in federal prison. The alleged mastermind of the bombing, Kuwaiti-born Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, also has numerous Afghan connections.

The Russians too have been bedeviled by further fallout from a war that cost them the lives of 14,500 soldiers and sapped the economy of the now-defunct Soviet Union. In March, one month before Russian forces located him in the mountains of Chechnya and killed him, Chechen independence leader Dzhokar M. Dudayev admitted for the first time that he had sent guerrillas to Afghanistan for military instruction.

“To tell you frankly, I do not give a damn about what Russia and the West think,” Dudayev said in an interview in a safe house in the village of Shalazhi. “Yes, I did send some well-trained groups to Afghanistan to exchange experience and get some training there. I did this because Afghanistan had been able to resist--almost with bare hands--one of the world powers and one of the mightiest armies in the world.”

The drilling at the camps of fundamentalist guerrilla chieftain Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami group took place in 1994, before the war with Russia broke out but when Dudayev could already sense it coming, Chechen sources said. The Chechen war rapidly mushroomed into post-Soviet Russia’s gravest crisis, costing the lives of 30,000 Chechens and Russians; it still rages.

Training Continues

The end of the jihad, or holy war, against Soviet and home-bred Marxist atheists in Afghanistan did not bring an end to the training here of foreigners who are seeking to learn the science of handling firearms and explosives.

Russian officials estimate that 4,000 to 5,000 Muslim militants from Tajikistan alone have passed through camps in northern Afghanistan, then gone back to the former Soviet Central Asian republic to battle the pro-Communist government that took power there in early 1993.

Camps for military instruction still are functioning, although at a reduced level, in locales including Paktia, Zabul, Nangarhar, Takhar and Badakhshan provinces, Russian sources with extensive contacts in Afghanistan reported recently.

“We are creating our own monsters, and then we cannot cope with them,” said a veteran Russian diplomat who blames the old superpower rivals for plunging Afghanistan into its present lawlessness and chaos.

On Feb. 15, 1989, the day Soviet Lt. Gen. Boris V. Gromov crossed the bridge over the Amu Darya on Afghanistan’s northern frontier to become the last Russian soldier to leave this country, jubilant officials at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., exchanged champagne toasts. One of the greatest victories in the Cold War, it seemed, had been won. The humiliating American defeat by the Communists in Vietnam had been avenged.

In retrospect, it is now clear that the war in Afghanistan and its aftermath were seminal events in the development of Islamic radicalism, perhaps the most important social and political trend of the late 20th century. The struggle was a rallying point for Muslim zealots from throughout the world and laid the groundwork for future cooperation and support.

In the jargon of the CIA, which orchestrated the covert campaign of assistance to the Afghan moujahedeen, spending roughly half a billion dollars a year, what happened is known as “blowback.”

“This is an insane instance of the chickens coming home to roost,” said one U.S. diplomat in neighboring Pakistan. “You can’t plug billions of dollars into an anti-Communist jihad, accept participation from all over the world and ignore the consequences. But we did. Our objectives weren’t peace and grooviness in Afghanistan. Our objective was killing Commies and getting the Russians out.”

In radical Islam’s rise, there have been numerous contemporary milestones, including: the 1979 fundamentalist revolution led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran; the Palestinian intifada, or uprising against Israeli occupation; and revolts and terrorism against repressive regimes in countries like Algeria and Egypt. But in the opinion of many experts, no other event has had the painful planetary consequences of the Afghan War.

The Violence Spreads

The conflict against the Russians and their allies in Kabul begat, by U.S. estimate, at least 10,000 foreign Muslim militants with some degree of military training. In many cases, they went on to sow terror or armed violence in other countries. The Afghan War also gave a significant boost to a hard-line interpretation of Islam. Followers of this version--inspired by the legacy of radical clerics such as Abul Ala Maududi of Pakistan and Sayyid Qutb and Abd Salam Faraj of Egypt--have come to advocate the proclamation of holy war against pro-Western, “tyrannical” Muslim governments.

“The pan-Islamic terrorist movement is, thus, beginning to be seen as the illegal offspring of the Afghan conflict of the ‘80s,” M. K. Narayanan, the former director of India’s Intelligence Bureau, has stated.

In its latest report, the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator of Counter-terrorism blames the Afghan conflict in large part for creating a new menace to the interests of the United States and friendly governments: the “transnational terrorist.”

Drawing on global funding, savvy about modern weapons and explosives, able to take advantage of the most up-to-date means of communication and transportation, this new breed is “more difficult to track and apprehend than members of the old established groups or those sponsored by states,” the State Department agency said this spring in its annual report. “Many of these transnational terrorists were trained in militant camps in Afghanistan or are veterans of the Afghan War.”

Peay, in his Senate committee testimony, said it is the ability to operate across borders that makes the new terrorists so hard to track and neutralize. “Their small, cellular structure and tendency to operate independently of state sponsors complicates monitoring of their activities,” said Peay, who is responsible for U.S. military operations in the Middle East.

If the charges leveled by the FBI and U.S. prosecutors are founded, Yousef--the terrorist suspect arrested in Islamabad, Pakistan, last year and deported to the United States--is the most notorious example yet of this lethal, unanticipated byproduct of the Afghan War.

Yousef, 28, is on trial in Manhattan Federal Court for an alleged terror plot to simultaneously bomb about a dozen Delta, Northwest and United airlines jumbo jets over the Pacific. He is due to go on trial in the World Trade Center bombing later this year. In the Philippines, the globe-trotting Muslim militant is accused of plotting to assassinate Pope John Paul II during a January 1995 visit; in Pakistan, of an aborted plan in 1993 to kill the current prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, with a bomb that, instead, blew up in Yousef’s face.

The exact steps of this self-described “explosives expert” with family roots in the Pakistani desert province of Baluchistan still are in dispute. But there is no doubt Yousef had an Afghan link.

A Pakistani investigator who interrogated him said Yousef is believed to have been in the town of Peshawar near the Afghan border in 1985-86 and to have trained and fought in the Afghan War under Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the most anti-Western of the seven moujahedeen faction leaders. For their part, U.S. investigators believe Yousef came later for training, in the three-year hiatus between the Soviet pullout and the fall of the Marxist government in Kabul.

In all countries where he is believed to have operated, Yousef availed himself of the assistance of local groups of Muslim militants, investigators have concluded. “It was the experience in Afghanistan that served as cement for these people,” a French law enforcement official said in Paris.

For more proof of that, consider the events one hot, sunny August morning two years ago, when two hooded men armed with submachine guns burst into the lobby of the Hotel Atlas-Asni in Marrakech, Morocco, as a third stood guard outside. The gunmen rifled the cash register and, as they were leaving with $1,300 in booty, showered a crowd of terrified tourists with bullets. Two Spaniards were killed.

A subsequent investigation disclosed that: The assailants were French nationals of North African origin from the rundown suburbs of Paris and Orleans; they had undergone military training in Afghanistan; the target was chosen to destabilize Morocco’s economically vital tourism industry; funds for the attack came via London; and the raid was coordinated in Peshawar.

“We see people working together now--Pakistanis, Egyptians, Algerians--who, before, were cloistered by nationality and had no contact,” the French official said.

Wave of Terrorism

For Egypt, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, the fallout from the Afghan War has been fearsome and tragic. Since 1992, the Arab world’s most populous country has been swept by a wave of anti-government terrorism in which graduates of the military training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan have played a major role.

Many of the Egyptian Islamist leaders have used Peshawar, the old jihad headquarters-in-exile, and the lawless tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border as a sanctuary and base. Last year, Afghan trainees were believed to have been behind the assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

“The Arab involvement in Afghanistan started as a noble cause--the defense of Islam and the defeat of Russian-backed communism,” Hassan Alfi, Egypt’s interior minister, said in an interview. “Unfortunately, some power took hold of these young men and changed their way of thinking. It changed their principles. Their way became violent, and they tried to compel others to take Islam by force. Then they came home and started setting the fires of terrorism.”

Alfi has been a target himself: Two terrorists on a motorcycle, one an Afghan War veteran, attacked his limousine with a bomb in 1993 and wounded him.

In Algeria, returnees from Afghanistan were important early players in the 4-year-old Islamic insurgency that inflamed the North African country after the army canceled January 1992 elections that fundamentalists of the Islamic Salvation Front were on their way to winning.

“Your government participated in creating a monster,” Mahfoud Bennoune, an Algerian sociologist, complained to a Times correspondent visiting Algiers. “Now it has turned against you and the world: 16,000 Arabs were trained in Afghanistan, made into a veritable killing machine.”

In recent years, veterans of Afghan training camps or battles also have trooped over battlefields in the disputed Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, in Bosnia and in the southern Philippines.

“Officer for officer, we may have more combat experience than the Philippines army,” one leader of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a Muslim insurgent force on the island of Mindanao, joked earlier this year to a correspondent from the Far Eastern Economic Review.

This is not to say that all violent unrest or terrorism in the Muslim world can be traced to Afghanistan; far from it. But in countries where they have been involved, “Afghans,” as one U.S. official noted, have been especially valuable as “force multipliers,” sharing their knowledge of small arms, demolition and guerrilla tactics with new recruits to the cause and acting as the hit squads of Islamic fundamentalism. “They can’t change the outcome, but they can certainly drive up the pain,” the official said.

As for Afghanistan itself, more than 16 years of nonstop warfare have pounded it to rubble and left more than 1 million people dead. As the nominal government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani and his allies and enemies, almost all of them former moujahedeen, still battle for power, the country has become a dangerous geopolitical black hole.

“Afghanistan has become a conduit for drugs, crime and terrorism that can undermine Pakistan and the neighboring Central Asian states and have an impact beyond, to Europe and Russia and even the United States,” Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphel, the top Clinton administration official for South Asian affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this year.

The State Department’s “Patterns of Global Terrorism” reports that almost all Afghan factions, including Rabbani’s rump government, are still “involved to some extent in harboring or facilitating camps that have trained terrorists from many nations who have been active in worldwide terrorist activity.”

Sons of the Jihad

In Afghanistan’s agony, a new generation of Muslim fighter, literally the sons of the jihad, also has arisen in the guise of the Taliban, an ultra-orthodox Islamic militia. Drawing tens of thousands of recruits from madrasas, or religious schools, on the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier, it has an avowed goal of creating a pure Islamic state on Afghanistan’s ruins.

“In the past years, the moujahedeen turned away from the right path and betrayed the cause of the jihad,” said Samad, the onetime moujahedeen commander, who has thrown in his fortune with the new militia and now commands its border detachment at Spin Boldak near Khojak Pass. “Taliban is the law of God in this part of the land. The only law that we want in Afghanistan is the law of Islam.”

Somewhat contrite, past and present U.S. policymakers now admit they didn’t see the Afghan blowback coming, especially the enormous global impact of the thousands of Arabs and other foreign fighters who shuttled into and out of Afghanistan and the training camps in the 1980s and early ‘90s. “In retrospect, we clearly missed something very important. We didn’t see the trees for the forest,” one former senior U.S. policymaker said.

The reason, one former senior intelligence official contends, is that the Reagan administration, former CIA Director William J. Casey and other “true believers” had single-mindedly embarked on a worldwide campaign--including an upswing in the clandestine agent program, covert operations in Nicaragua and Angola and an expanded U.S. Navy--meant to halt the spread of Soviet influence in the world and, if possible, roll it back.

“Afghanistan was a golden opportunity for the weakening of the Evil Empire,” Victor Marchetti, a former senior CIA official, said in an interview. “But the CIA has had this experience time and time again: Korea, Cuba, Vietnam. In all these clandestine activities, the pressure is so great to get something done and get it done right away that no one takes a long-term view. They hire all sorts of people, some of whom are crazy. When the operation ends, they are inevitably left with people trained in demolition, firearms use or guerrilla warfare, some of whom are suddenly out of a job.”

But, Marchetti pointed out, “a lot of this was going to happen anyway whether the U.S. government got involved or not. People were going to come there and fight against the Soviets. There was going to be money. The CIA just gave it shape and direction.”

Cold War Sideshow

For the majority of Americans, the Afghan conflict was a dimly understood sideshow of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry located halfway around the world. For people in Islamic countries, the viewpoint was wholly different. The triumph of the tough, brave but outgunned moujahedeen on the Afghan plains and mountains was, for many Muslims, one of the most important and far-reaching events of recent times.

“Islamic history in the last several hundred years has generally been one of failures. There hasn’t been much to cheer about, and a general sense of inferiority has become quite widespread,” said Sohail Mahmood, professor at the University of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan, and author of a study on Islamic fundamentalism in Iran, Egypt and Pakistan. “Finally, with victory in Afghanistan, there was a great morale booster.”

Given such a rare and dazzling success, imitation and emulation were inevitable where Muslims felt discriminated against, repressed or betrayed.

“Jihad is the key to all problems of the Muslim umma [community], whether in Bosnia, Chechnya or Kashmir,” Mast Gul, a Pakistani veteran of Afghanistan, told supporters after a daring armed foray into Indian-administered Kashmir that ended last year with a siege and the burning of the historic 500-year-old walnut-wood Muslim shrine at Charar-i-Sharif.

Even in the ghettos of Western Europe that are home to much of the continent’s rapidly growing Muslim minority, the Afghan War has had repercussions. France, whose Muslim population of 3 million is Western Europe’s largest, endured a series of eight bomb attacks last summer, beginning with a blast in an underground station of the Paris express commuter railway. All told, eight people were killed and 160 wounded.

French suspicions focused on the Islamic revolutionaries waging the ferocious war of insurgency against the French-backed government in Algeria. Once again, investigators found an Afghan link. “Almost all of the leaders of the people we have arrested for terrorism have passed by Afghanistan or Pakistan,” one law enforcement official in Paris said recently. “The know-how was learned there,” another said. “How to operate clandestinely as well.”

In many ways, the Afghan conflict was a powerful contributor to what Hassan Turabi, a radical Muslim leader in Sudan, calls “the Islamic awakening’s second wave.”

And the blowback from Afghanistan continues. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), who visited Afghanistan in 1988, this year termed the country a “ticking time bomb waiting to explode” and a “haven for Islamic extremists working against American interests.”

It would seem that the prophecy set down in elegant Persian more than six decades ago by one of the Indian subcontinent’s most celebrated poets has come true--beyond his wildest expectations. “Asia is a living body of mud and water; the Afghan nation is like its heart,” Muhammad Iqbal wrote in 1932. “If there is trouble in Afghanistan, all Asia will be troubled. If there is peace in Afghanistan, there will be peace in Asia.”

Times staff writers Robin Wright and Robert L. Jackson in Washington, Richard Boudreaux in Shalazhi, David Lamb in Cairo and John Daniszewski in Dhahran contributed to this report.

* Monday: Muslim fighters trained in Afghanistan have used the skills and contacts acquired there to blaze a trail of terror from the Philippines to France.

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Deadly Fallout of Holy War

Veterans of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan have helped spawn a new generation of militant Islamists and terrorists around the globe by providing military training, foot soldiers and radical leadership. Some major flash points:

1.* Morocco: Robbery and slaying of two Spaniards at Marrakech tourist hotel in August, 1994.

2.* Tajikistan: Armed opposition to Russian-backed government.

3.* France: Bombs kill 8, wound 160 in summer of 1995.

4. * Croatia: * Car bomb kills driver near Rijeka police station Oct. 20 after militant Talaat Fouad Kassem disappears while in custody.

5. * Russia: * Afghan- trained Chechen rebels fight for independence from Russia.

6. Bosnia- Herzegovina:

* Afghan War veterans train, fight with Bosnian Muslims against Bosnian Serbs and Croats.

* Muslim fighters blamed for slaying of American U.N. employee in November.

7. Philippines:

* Armed Islamic insurgency rages in Mindanao.

* Bomb kills 1 on Philippine Airlines jet in December 1994.

8. Pakistan:

* Home to extremist military training camps and thousands of Afghan War veterans.

* Car bomb kills 16 at Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad in November.

* Attempted assassination of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1993.

9. India: * Insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir state.

10. Yemen: * Bombings at Aden hotels leave tourist dead in 1992.

11. Saudi Arabia:

* Car bomb kills 5 Americans and 2 Indians at military training center in Riyadh in November.

* Truck bomb kills 19 U.S. airmen in Dhahran on June 25; Afghan veterans suspected.

12. Egypt:

* Anti- government campaign of Islamic Group, with attacks on police, foreign tourists and Coptic Christians.

* Assassination attempts against President Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia in June 1995 and against Interior Minister Hassan Alfi in 1993.

13. United States: * Bomb kills 6, wounds 1,000 at World Trade Center in New York in 1993.

14. Algeria: * Civil War, 50,000 dead; scores of foreigners slain.

Source: Times staff and wire reports

Afghanistan’s Anguish

Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations in the world, is a landlocked country of high, snow-capped mountain ranges traversed by deep, fertile valleys.

The nearly 15-year Afghan War left severe political, economic and ecological problems. Roads suffered extensive damage, and there are no railways except an extension of the Soviet rail system built during the war.

Life expectancy in Afghanistan is the lowest in the world, while its infant mortality rate is the highest. And though the war against Soviet rule ended in the establishment of an Islamic republic, rival Muslim factions still vie for control, continuing decades of bloodshed.

* Land: Slightly smaller than Texas

* Capital: Kabul

* Government: Republic

* Population: 21.5 million

* Ethnic composition: Mainly Pushtun, Tajik and Hazara

* Languages: Afghan Persian, Pushtu, Turkic

* Infant mortality rate: 152.8 deaths per 1,000 live births

* Life expectancy: 43 years

* Economy: Highly dependent on farming and raising sheep and goats. Prewar exports included fruits, nuts, hand-woven carpets, wool, cotton, hides and gems.

* Gross national product: Less than $300 per capita in 1992

* Literacy (age 15 and over who can read and write): 29%

SOURCES: CIA World Factbook 1995; Political Handbook of the World 1995-1996; Columbia Encyclopedia, 5th Ed.; Statesman’s Yearbook; Population Reference Bureau; Times staff and wire reports

Why the War?

Key events of Afghan conflict:

1973: A military coup led by former strongman Mohammed Daoud overthrows King Mohammed Zahir Shah; republic is proclaimed with Daoud as president.

1978: Left-wing revolution ousts Daoud, who is killed. Nur Mohammed Taraki is installed as head of a Marxist, pro-Soviet regime.

1979: Taraki yields office of prime minister to his hard-liner deputy, Hafizullah Amin, then dies mysteriously.

Amin imposes rigorous and unpopular Communist policies, resulting in an uprising that leads to a massive military intervention by the Soviet Union under leader Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Amin is killed and replaced by Babrak Karmal, who is flown in by the Soviets from exile in Eastern Europe.

1980: Within days of Soviet intervention, the United Nations calls for total withdrawal of foreign troops.

U.S. President Jimmy Carter imposes sanctions against the Soviet Union, including a halt in the sales of grain and high-technology equipment. U.S. boycotts Summer Olympic Games in Moscow. Civil war continues until 1989 in most parts of Afghanistan between the moujahedeen and Soviet-backed government forces.

1981: Newly elected President Ronald Reagan lifts embargo on grain sales.

1982: Afghan resistance makes neighboring Pakistan its base; 2.5 million Afghans take refuge there.

1984: Soviet Union boycotts Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

1985: Rival Afghan resistance elements agree to form seven-party coalition. Government proposes timetable for withdrawal of Soviet troops.

1986: Karmal is replaced as president by Najibullah, a former secret police director.

Resistance reportedly receives first supply of U.S.-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles, which they use to blunt effect of Soviet air power.

1987: Rebels reject power-sharing proposal. Najibullah says Soviet troops could be withdrawn within a year.

1989: Soviet troops complete withdrawal. Armed conflict increases between government and resistance forces.

1991: Talks between moujahedeen and Soviet government lead to transfer of Soviet support from Najibullah to interim Islamic regime.

1992: Najibullah steps down as moujahedeen closes in on Kabul.

The Islamic State of Afghanistan is declared.

BY THE NUMBERS

* Number of Soviet troops: Originally 30,000; grew to 110,000

* Nations aiding rebels: United States, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan

* Afghan casualties: 1 million dead, 5 million refugees

* Soviet casualties: 15,000 dead, 37,000 wounded

* Aftermath: More than 5 million land mines saturated the countryside as late as 1992

SOURCES: CIA World Factbook 1995; Columbia Encyclopedia, 5th Ed.; Statesman’s Yearbook; Times staff and wire reports. Researched by CARY SCHNEIDER.