afghanistanostracized by their community. In order to pay for seed and other costs
the peasants borrowed from urban moneylenders who charged exorbitant
levels of compound interest. When they were unable to make ends meet
or repay their debts, they sold the land or had it seized by debt collectors.
The government’s confiscation of auqaf lands removed another traditional
safety net for the rural poor, in the form of the distribution of the obliga-
tory zakat tax and supererogatory alms known as sadaqat or khairat. The
result was even greater hardship and some of the bitterest opponents of
Afghanistan’s Communist governments were the very people Marxism
was meant to empower and emancipate.
Taraki’s reforms were enforced at the point of a gun by a paramilitary
force known as the Sarandoi, or Defenders of the Revolution, which was
backed by the much-feared khad. These two bodies conducted a reign
of terror against the ‘enemies of the people’. During the eighteen months
of Taraki’s reign, hundreds of thousands of people were rounded up,
imprisoned and tortured, and it is possible that as many as 50,000 people
disappeared. 33 In Kabul’s middle-class suburbs, the silence of night was
punctuated by the screams of women as their menfolk were dragged from
their homes and often shot dead in the street. Among those who perished
during the Taraki purges were Professor Niyazi, Zia al-Mashayekh, the
Hazrat of Shor Bazaar, and around a hundred members of his Mujadidi
qaum, and Musa‘ Shafiq, the former prime minister. ‘Abd al-Rasul Sayyaf,
who had returned from exile in Pakistan, was also arrested but was
released, probably because he was a distant relative of Hafiz Allah ’Amin.
Sayyaf returned to Pakistan where he founded another anti-government,
jihadist militia, Itihad-i Islami.
Within a matter of months revolts began to break out all over the
country. In the summer of 1978 there were uprisings in Nuristan, Darra-yi
Suf, the Panjshir, Badakhshan and Helmand, while others voted with their
feet and a flood of refugees began to pour across the Pakistan frontier,
where they swelled the ranks of the Peshawar Islamist parties and the
emerging Shi‘a-Hazara resistance in Quetta. General Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s
military dictator, who had deposed Bhutto in July 1977, responded to the
Taraki coup by increasing financial and military assistance to the Peshawar-
based Sunni Islamists. In January 1979 the first major attack by mujahidin
occurred in Nangahar, marking the commencement of a jihad that would
last for more than a decade.