Talk:Khodaidad

Khodaidad's 'non-alignment'

For anyone interested: Khodaydad - as I prefer spelling it - was anything but 'non-aligned.' He was the military commander of Hezb i Wahdat forces in Kabul during the civil war period, spring 1992 through the winter of 1993. Hezb i Wahdat was an Iran-backed 'spoiler' faction, tasked by Iran with keeping the Sunni-dominated interim government from consolidating its power. The party was formed from eight or nine ethnic Hazara, Shia sectarian factions in 1989 or so, forced to unify under direct pressure from the Khomeini regime in Iran. (Tehran wanted to be able to compete with with the Saudis and Islamabad for influence in Kabul after the overthrow of the communists, and realized it couldn't do so with the Shia minority split among so many factions.) After the Moscow-backed regime collapsed, Khodaydad, til recently a hard-core communist, defected to Hezb i Wahdat. The party leader imposed by Iran, Abdul Ali Mazari, was even less picky than his Sunni rivals about on-boarding former communists. Perhaps that was because the domestic Wahdat ethos was much more ethnic 'Hazara pride' than Shia religious solidarity.

During the summer and fall of 1992, in a series of bloody clashes, Khodaydad's fighters systematically drove non-Hazara residents, as well as mujahideen belonging to other groups, from neighborhoods on the southwest side of Kabul. (The capital is split into northeast and southwest parts by a line of rocky peaks and ridges.) Additionally they often set up impromptu roadblocks on thoroughfares adjacent to neighborhoods under their control, taking non-Hazaras hostage for ransom and seizing their vehicles. Since few in Kabul had any money, most of the hostages wound up murdered. Baking captives to death in the summer heat in sealed shipping containers was common Hazara practice. Female captives paid a sort of ransom, on the installment plan as it were - though it never bought their freedom, and generally culminated in death via grisly sexual torture. Victims' bodies were dumped in cellars and stuffed down abandoned wells.

Khodaydad was never national security minister. This weird claim seems to reference his boss Mazari's demand, in the immediate aftermath of the mujahideen takeover, for Hazara control over a third of all government ministries including Nat'l Security - WAD, under its Persian acronym. WAD was modeled after KGB, with spies, saboteurs and uniformed commandos all under one roof. After the communist collapse, its remaining personnel were, like the Defense Ministry, kept firmly under the de facto control of the vastly larger Sunni Jamiat faction. They remained so until they were supplanted by the Taliban in 1996. Khodaydad never came within several km of the ministry. If he had tried - given tensions inspired by his followers' gruesome pastimes - he would have been summarily executed at the first roadblock he tried to pass. None of the other factions even took the demand seriously, precisely because Khodaydad and his party were so strongly aligned with Iran. As a Jamiat official scoffed at the time, rolling his eyes, 'I don't think we'll be handing our national-security apparatus over to Tehran.'

Until fall 1992, forces of the interim government, led by defense minister Ahmad Shah Masood, tried to mediate and keep the peace between Khodaydad's fighters and their Sunni rivals. But in December, Khodaydad and Mazari joined an abortive effort to overthrow the interim government. This led to weeks of fighting, which ended - for Khodaydad - when Masood's fighters overran the Hazaras, killed many or most, and drove the survivors out of western and most of southern Kabul. Khodaydad seems to have narrowly escaped - when I found his command post at the Polytechnic next day, he had abandoned all manner of maps, a scarlet booklet titled 'Founding Documents of the PDPA,' and the corpse of a fatally wounded fighter on a gurney, still hooked to his IV, in the next room.

The coup attempt involved a bizarre alliance with the more powerful Hezb i Islami party of nominal prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, aka the Butcher of Kabul. Hekmatyar's followers were Sunni Pashtuns, the precise demographic you wouldn't have thought the Hazaras would have done a deal with. But neither their leaders nor their backers in Tehran or Islamabad felt they had much choice. The mission, Tehran and Islamabad agreed, was to drive that pesky interim government from power: It had too much grassroots support, it controlled too much turf, it had captured too many weapons (including jet warplanes, Soviet tube and rocket artillery and Scud missiles). Left to its own devices, it might build a strong, independent Afghanistan not beholden to its neighbors. Intolerable!

Wherever Khodaydad fucked off to, after his humiliating defeat, henceforth it was Hekmatyar's commanders calling the shots, not him and any other Hazaras. I don't recall even hearing anything about him after that, so probably that's when he went to London. I expect he washed up in Kabul again, like a lot of other discredited 1980s flotsam, only after the dimwitted Americans took over and set about 'nation-building.' 216.81.81.84 (talk) 22:25, 15 June 2025 (UTC)