KABUL: Kabul’s Indian community has become a favorite target of roving bands of guerillas who loot the homes and stores of Hindus before throwing the victims out of the chaos-ridden city.

The raiders belonging to a dozen Mujahideen groups, cither loyal to the new Islamic Government or opposing it, have looted hundreds of homes, mainly belonging to the wealthy Hindu trading in this fallen city,

It is mostly the Hindus who are being attacked. We are helpless,” said an Asian diplomat on condition of anonymity.

Heavily armed guerrillas on an armored personnel carrier stopped a busload of Indians fleeing Kabul in front of the Interior Security Ministry, stripped men and women of their valuables and then ordered them to leave,

Allah is with you or else you all would have been dead,” the Mujahideen said laughing as the cowering Hindus fled without even daring to complain to the nearby Indian Embassy,

The attack came a day after Muslim raiders entered a Hindu’s home in the city’s Tehmani area and electrocuted the businessman, his ailing wife and son and decamped with everything , including pots and pans.

Neighbors, fearing the wrath of the looters, dared not complain for almost two days.

Hundreds of Hindus have abandoned their homes and escaped to India, since April when the Mujahideen entered Kabul and enforced new Islamic laws in the city which once boasted of a population of 40,000 Afghans of Indian origin living in total harmony with the Muslim citizens.

The interim administration of Sibghatullah Mojadidi has no police force and no army and dares not halt the chaos in Kabul, fearing reprisals from its own military allies.

His Uzbek militia supporters have lived up to their reputation by sponsoring scores of attacks and capturing civilian homes in Kabul instead of halting the growing anarchy that set in some 45 days ago when the country’s communist government of Dr.Najibullah was toppled.

Several Hindu homes are now at the disposal of the Mojadidi Government,” said an Afghan official source. Defence Minister Ahmad Shah Masood has set up his camps in a lavish bungalow, once the property of a Hindu exporter, Sona Ram, who has since fed without a change of clothes,

The homes of two Indian diplomats have been seized, a third looted and posters pasted on the mission’s First Secretary’s residence forcing others to move their valuable baggage into the fortified diplomatic complex.

An embassy-run school is now under Mujahideen control. The city’s main Indian Airlines office has been burgled of all its money and its workers of their personal cash,

The city’s main money market, located close to Mujadidis palace, is run mainly by Hindus, It now wears a deserted look after the abduction of its main trader, Chaman Lal Kapoor, earlier this month, His ransom of $100,000 spread panic among the local business community.

Kapoor was the first in the line of abductions from among Indians in Kabul, where dozens are killed daily in street fighting.

Article extracted from this publication >> July 3, 1992