Journalists like Rania Khalek, and many elites in Kabul skip over the 1980s entirely while slandering our Martyrs and revising the root causes of today’s violence.

The most troubling for me personally is how the Mujahideen are completely dismissed these days. I grew up around these guys. They were my relatives, my uncles. My father was also involved, but on the political side of the resistance movement.

I don’t talk about these things very often because it’s something shared among the entire Afghan population. No one came out of any of this unscathed, but right now, with the amount of disinformation that’s coming out of Kabul and the mouths of Islamophobic, revisionist journalists it has become necessary to address these revisions.

The blame for the current violence in Afghanistan falls immediately and absolutely on the so-called or self-described communists.

In 1978 the communist factions Khalq and Parcham, backed by the Soviets, conducted a coup that they call the Saur Revolution, killing Daud Khan and massacring his family. Once these factions were in control they began summarily killing just about anyone they remotely suspected of being in opposition. Going to the Masjid too often was enough for them. They were also killing each other.

Some of my uncles had already begun their resistance by this point. Muslim and Islamist activists at Kabul university were regularly fighting and competing against the various communist groups for control of the university's student association. The communists had the jump on the university’s politically minded Muslims and were first to organize themselves – they were able to take control of KU’s student association at the university. However, Islamic groups started to organize on campus and grew rapidly, taking the student association out of the hands of the campus communists.

The communists, just as many of them do today, would call the Muslim and Islamists “reactionary” as well as “foreign agents” or “agents of the Muslim Brotherhood,” and the Muslim groups would call the communists “Kafirs” – they would fight each other constantly. This was essentially the power base of all political factions at the time. What happened at KU was a fairly accurate reflection of how things would go for the country.

The mass, violent repression and extrajudicial killings that the communists were carrying out pushed Islamic groups in Afghanistan into militancy. But it wasn’t until the wanton killings starting in 1978 that the Mujahideen went from being an underground resistance movement to a popular resistance movement.

My father wasn’t in Afghanistan when the communists killed Daud Khan and took control of the country; he was on his way back from travelling abroad when he got the news. He had already made the decision that if the communist factions inside the government took control, he would join his cousins who had begun taking up arms.

He was in Iran, but had enough sense not to try entering Afghanistan through the Iran-Afghanistan border. There was no way he could trust any Afghan security forces at that time. Mind you, my father was also in the air force at the time – I think he had stuck around after initially being conscripted. He made his way to Moscow and then flew to Tajikistan and from there he entered Afghanistan and made his way back to Kabul through Mazar-e-Sharif.

He took a bit of time before reporting back to duty, but had already begun forging documents stating that he was ill so he could avoid a certain death if he had stuck around – many of his friends and acquaintances were being arrested and disappearing. He managed to get out duty before the noose closed in on him.

My father and his younger brother, Sami, started their activities with simple leaflets and anti-Soviet propaganda. They would stay up late and write communiqués. They were basically an underground printing press that worked by hand. They’d drop them at the doorstep of houses at night or simply leave them in a park for the wind to take – they called these “night letters”. During one of these messaging operations, meant to inspire people to join the growing resistance against the communists, my father accidentally dropped off a stack but forgot that he had a legal document with his name and address on it that he had left along with the leaflets. He had left the stack of papers under a tree in a park, but luckily the stack was still there when he came back.

My uncle Sami was arrested in our village after someone snitched him out for housing one of my uncles and Mawlawi Mohammed Younus Khalis (Note: Khalis together with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar led the Hizb-i-Islami political party until they split. At this point in history, Hizb-i-Islami was two branches – one led by Khalis, the other by Hekmatyar)

My father’s older brother, Yacoub, had established a group that was opposed to the communists, comprised of lawyers, intellectuals, former parliamentarians and so on that he had hoped would be integral to whatever came after the inevitable collapse of the communist regime. He was arrested in his office. Apparently the group he created had been infiltrated, as he had once warned my father of the possibility.