War of A Thousand Skirmishes

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Since Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan in December 1979, an estimated 500,000 people have been killed in a war that has pitted Soviet and Afghan military units against anti-Communist mujahedin guerrillas. The Soviets say they want to get out, but five years of talks in Geneva have yielded no results. The bloody conflict has largely taken place away from public attention, but two reporters succeeded in visiting the two sides of the conflict for TIME. Robert Schultheis spent two weeks in the field with the mujahedin, and Ken Olsen last week toured the battle zone with Afghan government troops. Their reports:

The Mujahedin Press Hard

The MiGs arrived over Spina Bora, some 20 miles from Jalalabad, Afghanistan's fifth largest city, just before 7 a.m. Half a dozen jets flew out of the northwest, dropped parachute flares to deflect heat-seeking missiles, and then began their bombing runs. Mujahedin 12.7-mm and 14.5-mm heavy machine guns opened fire from the surrounding mountains, shooting in wide arcs across the sky. At the guerrilla base, Commander Khan Emir and about 20 of his men stood defiantly on an open knoll, firing at the jets with AK-47 assault rifles and RPG-7 grenade launchers. Other nearby guerrilla bases have small numbers of American-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles, but the mujahedin at Spina Bora have not received any.

A few weeks ago, 18 guerrillas died here in a MiG attack, but this time the napalm and high explosives fell wide of the mark, exploding to the north and south of the knoll. The MiGs then turned back toward Kabul, except for one jet that was trailing smoke. It headed toward the nearby airfield at Jalalabad.

The conflict in Afghanistan is a war of a thousand skirmishes. The mujahedin from Spina Bora and neighboring bases have in recent weeks been attacking Soviet and Afghan government defensive positions around Jalalabad. The air base there has been virtually shut down because of the threat of Stingers fired from the surrounding hills. During April, five MiGs and several Mi-24 helicopter gunships were shot down in the Jalalabad area by the potent shoulder-fired missiles. Now the Soviets are counterattacking, sending waves of MiGs from the Bagram air base, outside Kabul.