KhAD had a frontline role to play in confronting opposition. Here,
the regime lived in fear not so much of violent overthrow by a
popular uprising, but rather of the targeting of regime officials for
assassination, and the bombing of public buildings. Regime figures
killed in Kabul included Deputy Minister for Education Wali
Yusufi in July 1980; the Deputy Head of KhAD, Brigadier Ghulam
Sakhi Atal, in April 1981; the Commander of the Revolutionary
Defence Militia, Sharafuddin Sharaf, in April 1981; the Head of
the Central Army Corps, Abdul Wadood, in September 1982; the
Head of Afghan Ariana Airlines, Captain Sayed Baba, in March
1983; and a Departmental Director in the Ministry of Education,
Dost Muhammad, in May 1985.
KhAD’s response took two forms. One was a vigorous effort to
penetrate urban resistance groups with a view to thwarting their
anti-regime activities before they could be brought to fruition. The
other was to deter people from becoming involved in anti-regime
activities in the first place, through the use of high levels of coer-
cive power against suspects. In practice, this amounted to the tor-
ture of prisoners, which was documented extensively by Amnesty
International (Amnesty International, 1983; Amnesty International,
1984; Amnesty International, 1986); the United Nations Special
Rapporteur on Human Rights in Afghanistan (United Nations,
1985a; United Nations 1985b); and researchers under the auspices
of Human Rights Watch (Laber and Rubin, 1988). Women were
not spared, as the story of Fahima Nassery makes clear. Mrs
Nassery, a mathematics teacher at the Aiasha-i Durrani High
School in Kabul from 1969, was arrested in May 1981: ‘I was
taken to a room where I witnessed the most horrible sight of my
detention. Cut fingers, noses, ears, legs, hands, breasts, and hair of
women were piled there. In one corner, a decayed corpse was
lying. The smell of blood and the decayed corpse were intolerable.
I remained in that chamber of horrors until the following morning’
(Rahimi, 1986: 108). There were female as well as male interroga-
tors; some were her former students (Nassery, 1986: 11).
These policies were put into practice in the system of prisons
which KhAD operated in Kabul. The largest and most notorious
100 The Afghanistan Wars