was again apparent in the aftermath of the so-called ‘Operation
Magistral’, in which the siege of Khost was broken. This has been
described as ‘the largest operation of the war’ (Grau, 1998: 65),
and involved 18,000 troops – 10,000 Soviet and 8000 regime
(Urban, 1990: 230). It began on 28 November 1987, and on 29
December, the road to Khost from Gardez was finally opened to
convoys. Yet by the end of January 1988, Soviet forces were
obliged to abandon the positions which they had taken up on the
Gardez–Khost road.
The south was a deeply troubled area. Kandahar remained an
area of great difficulty for the regime; while it had a significant
airport, it was markedly the most remote from Soviet territory of
any major Afghan city, and very close to the border with Pakistan,
although its relatively flat terrain did not lend itself readily to guer-
rilla operations. Missiles were also used by the resistance to
powerful effect: on 27 July 1987, a missile shot down a plane car-
rying senior Soviet and Afghan personnel as it attempted to land at
Kandahar airport. In Kandahar, the involvement of Esmatullah
Muslim’s militia in support of the regime gave an added bitterness
to the conflict. The death on 3 June 1987 of Mohammad Eshaq
(‘Lala Malang’), a noted commander from Mawlawi Khalis’s
Hezb-e Islami, was a blow to the resistance, but Haji Abdul Latif’s
forces continued to operate, and the Soviet withdrawal led to
renewed heavy fighting in May–June 1988 near Kandahar,
although without decisive shifts either for or against the regime.
By contrast, on 17 June 1988, Qalat, the provincial capital of
Zabul, was seized by the resistance, and although it was retaken
four days later, it gave cause for alarm, since it was the first
provincial capital to slide into opposition hands, and it also strad-
dled the main road between Kabul and Kandahar. As Soviet forces
withdrew, urban centres such as Qalat were also of symbolic
importance: the fall of such a centre could easily trigger a cascade
of defections from the regime. Hence the effort made to retake it.
Kabul, too, saw some spectacular Mujahideen strikes. For ex-
ample, on 26 August 1986, a series of massive explosions occurred
in an ammunition dump at Kargha after 107-mm and 122-mm
The Najibullah-Gorbachev Period 1986–1989 111