The poison gas attack on Habib’s village is recalled as the event that erased his home and family and changed the course of his life. In Abdel Khader Khan’s account, it also exposes the civilian cost of a war in which new weapons were being tested.

Background and Attack

Before the attack, Habib Abdur Rahman had been a schoolteacher in a village on the far side of the mountains. Seven years after the Russians invaded, he was remembered as a happy man with a young wife and two sons. Like other young men in the region, he joined the resistance. Two years before the account, he returned from a mission to find that the Russians had attacked his village with what Abdel Khader Khan described as a nerve gas. Ahmed Zadeh added that the Russians denied using the gas, while asserting that land mines, rockets, and other weapons in the war were experimental. He presented the attack as part of a conflict in which new weapons were being tested on a scale and in circumstances unlike earlier wars.

Aftermath and Transformation

The attack left no one alive in the village: Habib’s relatives across generations, his wife and children, childhood friends, and neighbors were all lost, along with the village’s animals and other living creatures. He buried them alone, a task that took so long that its completion marked a dividing line in his life. He then returned to his Afghan resistance unit, but the loss had changed how he fought. He began seeking out Russian soldiers and Afghan soldiers fighting alongside them, capturing many and killing them in retaliation. The sharpened steel spike he used was made from the shovel he had used to bury his family; when Abdel Khader Khan recounts the story, it is still strapped to the top of Habib’s pack. The same object thus connects the labor of mourning to the violence that followed, making the attack’s consequences visible in Habib’s changed conduct.

The Attack as an Explanation

Abdel Khader Khan recounts the attack to Lin with an apology, setting Habib’s later actions against the destruction that preceded them. Ahmed Zadeh’s interruption broadens the account from one village’s fate to a claim about experimental weapons in the war, while the shovel turned into a weapon gives the story a stark material link between burial and retaliation. The explanation establishes the scale of Habib’s loss and the change it produced, without making his subsequent violence erase the attack’s civilian victims or its consequences.

Testimony and Uncertainty

The account reaches Lin through Abdel Khader Khan’s explanation, interrupted by Ahmed Zadeh’s insistence that the Russians denied using gas. That disagreement keeps the reported attack within the characters’ testimony rather than presenting it as an impersonal report, while the details of Habib’s return and the village’s destruction give the claim human scale. The exchange also shifts the focus from the dispute over what the Russians admitted to the consequences Habib carried forward.