Tamim Ansary
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The Story of My Life: An Afghan Girl on the Other Side of the Sky (2005) — Medewerker — 336 exemplaren
The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection (2019) 133 exemplaren
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There were stories that both sides used booby traps and explosive devices disguised to look like everyday objects such as watches and pens. Much play was made with the story, which figured in a UN report of 1985 as well as in Western propaganda, that the KGB deliberately designed mines to look like children’s toys, in order to sow a particularly vicious kind of terror among ordinary Afghans. The Russians countered with stories that this was a tactic of the mujahedin and published photographs to back their claim. The story may have had its origin in the tiny ‘butterfly’ mines made of brightly coloured plastic, which were scattered from helicopters along rebel trails and supply routes. They were supposed to deactivate themselves after a given period, but often the deactivation mechanism did not work. But these devices were not the product of the twisted imagination of the KGB’s engineers. They were directly copied from the American Dragontooth BLU-43/B and BLU-44/B mines, used in very large numbers in Indo-China. They were intended to maim rather than to kill, since a wounded soldier is more trouble to his comrades than a dead one. The official name of the Soviet version was PFM-1, but the soldiers called them lepestki (petals). It is not surprising that children should have found them attractive, and that they and their parents should have reported them to journalists as disguised toys. But the experts in the Mine Action Coordination Centre of Afghanistan, whose job it was to know about these things, believed that the story ‘gained a life for obvious journalist reasons – but it has we think no basis in widespread fact’.24
24 - Alan A. H. Macdonald, Chief of Staff , Mine Action Coordination Centre of Afghanistan, email to author, 4 May 2009.
Afgantsy: The Russians In Afghanistan, 1979-1989 by Rodric Braithwaite, рp.234-5… (meer)