1. Lester W. Grau, “The Soviet-Afghan War: A Superpower Mired in the Mountains,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2004), p. 130.
2. Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 4;
3. Sylvain Boulouque, “Communism in Afghanistan,” in Stéphane Courtois Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karol Bartošek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 717, 725.
4. The Afghanistan Justice Project, Casting Shadows: War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, 1978–2001 (Kabul: Afghanistan Justice Project, 2005), p. 4.
5. M. Kassan Kakar, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979–1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 213, 215–216.