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Posted on 10/11/2001 4:58:31 PM PDT by Pokey78

AMONG the heaps of stacked tank treads, machinegun barrels, tripods and rocket-launchers strewn around the Northern Alliance arms workshop at Parakh in the Panshjir Valley, lie weapons that have seen three generations of conflict.

From the snows of the Russian steppes in the Second World War, to Afghanistan in 1979 to bombard the guerrillas, the weapons now being repaired for use against the Taleban are the oldest in the otherwise smart-technology “war against terrorism”.

“It’s still a good weapon,” Mohammed Shah, chief engineer in the workshop’s artillery section, said, patting the barrel of a Russian 76mm field gun dated 1942.

“The Russians built weapons and machines that really lasted and coped with the dust and cold. They come in here now if they have problems, like this one has with its breech. We can almost always fix them quickly and get them back to the front.”

There are more than 50 artillery pieces of various calibres around him. Nearly half are of Second World War vintage.

Having been deprived of almost all technology over its 22-year history of war, Afghanistan is full of examples of ingenuity, but few are as impressive as the workshop at Parakh, the Alliance’s main engineering faculty.

Created by the Mujahidin during its war against the Soviet occupation, the workshop began as a place where a few engineers fixed broken Kalashnikovs. It looks like a scrapheap. Yet from numerous sheds comes a constant sound of banging and drilling as engineers repair everything from jammed machineguns to tank engines, as well as designing their own weapons.

About 1,200 men are employed there. They have only one furnace, a tiny improvised diesel affair the size of a dustbin fanned by motor-driven bellows. They use it to melt down battlefield junk to produce tailfins for rockets.

A long timber and mud warehouse holds about 20 Russian lathes of Cold War vintage which the Mujahidin managed to pull out from a factory in Kabul as they retreated from the Taleban in 1996.

Powered by a single, large generator, and lit by nothing more than 20 60-watt light bulbs and three angle-poise lamps, the lathes are used for reboring barrels and making engine parts.

“We are particularly proud of our truck-mounted rocket,” Abdul Hafiz Khan, formerly a communist engineer, said.

“The Taleban are always slow in their attacks and like to push tanks up first. We needed a fast, mobile rocket system to hit the infantry behind the tanks. So we cut Katyusha rocket barrels in half, weld them on to the turret mounts from wrecked armoured personnel carriers and attach them to the back of trucks. They’re great.”

So the clanking and banging in the tool sheds of Parakh continues, as guns built to kill Nazis are prepared for another genration’s use on the dusty battlefields of Afghanistan.

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