Three Decades on From Kunar Massacre
Three Decades on From Kunar Massacre
Recent cycles of violence in Afghanistan sometimes obscure the fact that major atrocities have been going unpunished since the late 1970s.
In 1979, Kunar province in eastern Afghanistan was the launchpad of the fledgling mujahedin insurgency, and after one battle, Afghan troops of the Khalqi communist regime carried out reprisals against the area’s civilian population.
Around 1,300 residents of the village of Kerhala were summoned to a public meeting. The army surrounded the crowd and opened fire indiscriminately. Only a handful survived, protected as more bodies fell on top of them. In this report, IWPR interviewed some of those survivors about their memories of that day.
Shoaib Gharwal is an IWPR-trained radio reporter in Afghanistan.
This radio report, in Pashtu, was produced under IWPR’s Afghan Witness Project, designed to promote transitional justice.
