afghanistanformer deputies and elders’ to ‘attack the government as Communists’, 15
and proceeded to list a number of leading Islamists who were allegedly
involved in the plot. Shortly after this announcement Maulana Habib
al-Rahman, head of the Muslim Youth Organization, Maulana Faizani,
Prof. Niyazi and Muhammad Sarwar Nashir, formerly governor of
Qataghan and head of the Spinzar Cotton Company, were arrested along
with dozens of high -ranking military and government officials. 16 Other
leading Islamists, however, escaped the purge, including Sibghat Allah
Mujadidi, ‘Abd al-Rauf Sayyaf, Gulbudin Hikmatyar, Burhan al-Din
Rabbani and a Panjshiri engineering student and friend of Hikmatyar’s,
Ahmad Shah Mas‘ud. They fled to Peshawar where they formed an Islamist
opposition to Da’ud. Following the Soviet invasion of December 1979, these
men would become the most prominent leaders of the resistance.
The arrival of these political refugees provided Zu’l-fiqar ‘Ali Bhutto,
Pakistan’s prime minister, with a major propaganda coup, which he
exploited to the full to undermine Da’ud’s credibility with Frontier
Pushtuns and the Afghan government’s Islamic credentials. Da’ud’s coup
and the revival of the Pushtunistan issue had come at a difficult time for
Bhutto, who was engaged in a power struggle with the Pushtun-dominated
National Awami League (nal) led by ‘Abd al-Ghaffar Khan’s son, Khan
Wali Khan. In March 1973, a few weeks before the fall of King Zahir Shah,
Federal Security Forces had opened fire on a nal rally in Rawalpindi, kill-
ing and wounding dozens of protestors. In February the following year,
when the governor of the Northwest Frontier Province was assassinated in
a car bomb attack, Bhutto blamed the nal for his death and arrested Khan
Wali Khan and other nal leaders. They were tried and found guilty of trea-
son, though on appeal the High Court acquitted them. Other leading nal
members fled across the border into Afghanistan where the government
welcomed them with open arms.
In an attempt to undermine Da’ud’s Republican government, Bhutto
encouraged the Peshawar Islamist refugees to stage a revolt and provided
them with basic military training, cash and weapons. On the second anni-
versary of the Republic, the Islamists planned a series of attacks on outlying
provincial centres, but the uprising was poorly coordinated. Most of the
agitators were arrested before they could do any harm and the rebel leaders
anyway found there was little support for their revolt. The exception was
in the Koh Daman, where Ahmad Shah Mas‘ud’s Panjshiris overran the
government offices in Bazarak, Jabal Saraj, Gulbahar and Shortal. Da’ud
responded by airlifting paratroopers into the region and sending tanks,
heavy artillery and MiG jets to pound rebel positions. The Panjshiris fled