Soldiers of God Read Free Page A

like the white flags above the graves of martyred mujahidin. Soviet helicopter gunships would fly in at one or two thousand feet and litter the ground with mines. The butterfly's winged shape caused it to go into a spin, slowing its descent. The detonator pin was set on impact with the ground. Green was the most common color, but the Soviets had a light brown version for desert areas and a gray one for riverbeds. Some mujahidin, not knowing this, thought the mines actually changed color.
    Only eight inches long and blending in with the ground, the butterfly mine was hard to spot, especially if you were fatigued from hours of walking, which was most of the time. Except for the light aluminum detonator it was all plastic, so it was difficult to detect with mine-sweeping equipment. The mine was often mistaken for a toy by Afghan children, who paid with the loss of a limb or an eye. Its explosive power was about equal to that of the smallest hand grenade: sufficient to maim, not to kill. Contrary to Soviet claims, the mine has no self-destruct mechanism, and will be mutilating Afghans for a long time to come.
    Butterfly mines, along with aerial bombardment, were the centerpiece of Moscow's strategy of depopulation. Depopulation had come after pacification had failed and before the Communist-inspired bombing campaign in Pakistani cities. During the heyday of depopulation, in the early and mid-1980s, the Soviets dropped plastic mines disguised as wrist-watches and ball-point pens over Afghan villages in the heavily populated Panjshir Valley northeast of Kabul.
    There were even reports of mines disguised as dolls. The New York-based Afghanistan Relief Committee ran an advertisement in a number of American magazines featuring a photograph of a doll with its left arm blown off and a caption that read, “The toy that's making a lasting impression on thousands of Afghan children.” The larger version of these adscontained a line in small type advising the reader that the doll in the photograph was not a real Soviet bomb, but a replica constructed on the basis of refugee accounts. In fact, no photographs of such dolls exist, even though one would have been worth thousands of dollars to a news photographer. Peter Jouvenal, a British television cameraman who made over forty trips inside Afghanistan with the mujahidin and saw every other kind of Soviet mine, suspected that the story of the dolls was apocryphal. “The Soviets were guilty of so much in Afghanistan. Why exaggerate?” he remarked.
    Right up to the time of their withdrawal, the Soviets kept introducing new kinds of mines. When journalists entered the garrison town of Barikot, in Kunar province near the Pakistan border, after the Soviets had evacuated it in April 1988, they discovered mines stuck on stakes in the bushes. They dubbed them Noriega mines, on account of their pineapple texture. These were sonic mines, fitted with diaphragms that picked up the lightest footstep and sprayed shrapnel thirty feet in all directions.
    In Barikot, the Soviets also booby-trapped grain bags in some of the places they evacuated, using a grenade with its detonator pin pulled, hooked up to a trip wire concealed in the sack. Several mujahidin and a dozen refugees were wounded when they opened the bags.
    The overwhelming majority of hospital patients in Peshawar and Quetta were mine victims. After Red Cross doctors operated on them, the wounded were dispatched to clinics run by the various mujahidin political parties to recover. These clinics lived on donations from the refugees themselves and usually received little or no aid from either international relief organizations or the Pakistani government. Pakistani landlords owned the clinics and charged as much rent as they could. In the heat of summer, when temperatures rarely dipped below ninety degrees in daytime, there were no fans or air conditionersfor the patients, who were accustomed to the bracing mountain climate of Afghanistan. The