Women in the Soviet–Afghan War

[10][11][12][13] According to Aisha Ahmad of the University of Cambridge:Under Communist occupation, wartime rape gained popularity as a military strategy to repress insurgency...

It is perhaps due to the great importance of traditional family honor codes in Afghanistan that wartime rape became a prevalent military strategy during the Soviet-Afghan War, employed to intimidate and terrorize enemy factions.

Afghan women, while not active combatants against the Soviets, were also the direct targets of "deliberate and arbitrary killings," persecution, terror tactics, and deprivation, as well as sexual abuse, forced marriage, and prostitution by pro-Soviet militia.

But during coups and Soviet occupation in the 1970s, through civil conflict between Mujahideen groups and government forces in the '80s and '90s, and then under Taliban rule, women in Afghanistan had their rights increasingly rolled back.

Timothy Nunan of Oxford University has argued that "Soviet and Afghan feminists tried – and largely failed – to communicate with one another at a moment when it appeared possible to create a secular socialist modernity in Afghanistan.

[19] Kamal was assassinated in Quetta, Pakistan, in 1987, possibly by the Afghan Intelligence Service KHAD or on the orders of fundamentalist Mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

"[24] Joanne Herring, an American socialite and diplomat who had a long association and political relations with the President of Pakistan Zia-ul-Haq during the 1980s, was a leading figure in creating United States support for the Mujahideen during the War.