The Execution in Kabul: Alain Mingam’s Haunting Photograph of the Soviet-Afghan War

It is one of those photographs that stops you in your tracks. A bearded man in a turban stands stoically in the centre of the frame. Around him, rifles, sabres, and axes press against his body, the weapons so close that they all but touch his skin. His eyes are resigned, his face carved in lines of age and defiance.

Condemned by an Islamic war tribunal for denouncing nine families, a man is escorted 20 km outside Kabul for execution. 1980.

Taken in June 1980, just six months after Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan, this image by French photographer Alain Mingam captures a moment of raw human brutality: the execution of a man condemned for betraying nine families to the Russians.

For Mingam, it was not just another assignment. The experience would haunt him for years.

“If I had not been there, the man would not have been shot and then ritually beheaded,” he later admitted. “For months afterwards, I could not sleep. I felt like an accomplice.”

Afghanistan in 1980: A Country on Fire

By the time this photograph was taken, Afghanistan was already a country in upheaval. Two years earlier, in 1978, the Saur Revolution had swept aside the Afghan monarchy with Soviet support, installing the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA).

The new government, led first by Nur Mohammed Taraki, embarked on a rapid programme of socialist reforms: land redistribution, secular education, and restrictions on traditional marriage customs. For many conservative Afghans, these measures felt like an assault on Islam itself.

The backlash was immediate. In 1979, Taraki was killed and replaced by Hafizullah Amin, but the situation worsened. Insurgent groups, later known collectively as the Mujahideen, emerged from mountain strongholds and rural villages. Supported by Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, and increasingly the United States, they posed a serious threat to Kabul’s pro-Soviet regime.

When Soviet forces invaded in December 1979, they believed they could stabilise their southern neighbour. Instead, they found themselves bogged down in a long and bitter guerrilla war that would come to be called their own Vietnam.

Mingam and the Mujahideen

Into this chaos stepped Alain Mingam, a French photographer who, by his own admission, was fascinated by the Afghan resistance.

“For someone like me who didn’t cover the Vietnam War, the Mujahideen’s battle against the biggest army in the world was David versus Goliath: those bearded, turbaned men fascinated me,” he recalled.

Mingam was sympathetic to their cause, and the Mujahideen knew the value of having their struggle documented. They specifically brought him to witness the execution of the alleged traitor, staging the event in front of his camera.

The man was escorted twenty kilometres outside Kabul, tried by an Islamic war tribunal, and condemned to death. First he was shot. Then, in keeping with ritual practice, he was beheaded. Mingam’s camera immortalised the moment just before the act.

The image, stark and unforgettable, became one of the most iconic photographs of the Soviet-Afghan War. But it also raised profound ethical questions about the role of the photographer in war: observer or participant?

“If I had not been there, the man would not have been shot and then ritually beheaded,” Mingam later reflected.

War Photography and the Burden of Witness

Mingam’s torment over the execution placed him in the long, uneasy tradition of war photographers who have wrestled with their role.

In the Spanish Civil War, Robert Capa supposedly captured the moment a soldier was shot dead, an image that became one of the defining photographs of the 20th century. During the Vietnam War, Eddie Adams photographed the summary execution of a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street in 1968, a picture that shocked the world and won a Pulitzer Prize. Adams later said he wished he had never taken it, because it defined the man holding the gun, General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, as a villain forever.

Like Capa and Adams, Mingam bore the guilt of knowing that his presence influenced events. His camera was not just recording history, it was shaping it.

The War That Changed the World

The execution outside Kabul was one small episode in a war that would have vast global consequences.

The Soviet Union poured men, money, and machines into Afghanistan but could never defeat the Mujahideen. American and Saudi support, funnelled largely through Pakistan’s intelligence services, ensured the resistance stayed well-armed. By the mid-1980s, U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles were knocking Soviet helicopters from the sky with devastating effect.

After nearly a decade of grinding conflict, the Soviets withdrew in 1989. The war had cost them over 15,000 soldiers, drained their economy, and shattered their international prestige. Many historians argue that Afghanistan was a major factor in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

But for Afghanistan, the end of Soviet occupation was not the end of suffering. The country descended into civil war, paving the way for the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s. The seeds of future global conflict had been sown.

Three Muslim rebels, one armed with a Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifle, left, the others with older bolt-action rifles, pose on horseback during a rebel meeting at village near Herat, on February 15, 1980. Despite the presence of Soviet and Afghan government troops in the area, the rebels patrolled the mountain ranges along the Afghan-Iran border.

A Photograph That Still Speaks

Looking back, Mingam’s photograph is more than a document of one man’s death. It is a window into the complex entanglement of ideology, religion, and geopolitics that defined the Cold War’s bloodiest frontier.

It is also a reminder of the moral burden borne by those who record war. To witness is to preserve truth. But sometimes, as Mingam found, to witness is also to participate.

In that frozen moment, the condemned man standing defiant as weapons close in, we see not only the tragedy of one life, but the tragedy of a nation caught between superpowers, paying the ultimate price.

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Sources

• Alain Mingam, interviews on war photography: featured in Le Monde and Paris Match retrospectives.

• Alain Mingam official archive & exhibitions: https://alainmingam.com

• Time Magazine: “The Soviet War in Afghanistan, 1979–89” photo archive (includes Mingam’s execution photo).

• The Guardian: “The War in Afghanistan: Soviet Union’s Vietnam” historical photo features.

• BBC News – Soviet-Afghan War: The Cold War’s Final Battleground (includes reflections on Western journalists/photographers in Afghanistan).

• Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden (Penguin, 2004) — broader context on Mujahideen, Soviets, and Western coverage.

• Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–89 (Profile Books, 2011) — details on the Soviet perspective and war environment.

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