The Battle of Hill 3234 (7-8 January 1988) was a successful battle fought by The 9th Company of the 345th Independent Guards Airborne Regiment of the Soviet Union against the Mujahideen and the Pakistani Special Services Group. Only one soldier survived the battle, Sergeant Oleg Lutaev, with the rest of the men being killed or injured. 200+ Mujahideen were killed in the battle.
Battle[]
Hill 3234 Operation Magistral
The 9th Company's last stand
A single company of Soviet paratroopers held high ground against mujahideen guerrillas, who outnumbered them 10 to one. Exhausting their ammunition supply, the Soviets repelled at least a dozen assaults by the Mujahideen.
The Soviets, led by General Boris Gromov, led a relief force to aid Khost in Operation Magistral in late 1987 and early 1988, and heavy fighting began between USSR troops and Jalaluddin Haqqani's Mujahideen rebel army. The Soviets used captured mortars against the Mujahideen rebels, killing many of them, before retreating. The Mujahideen's cruelty was shown during this battle when they burnt two captured Soviet troops alive using a lighter, and a group of Soviet troops nearby massacred the rebels after seeing that the prisoners were killed.
Sergeant Oleg Lutayev's squad of six troops retreated to an unnamed hill, which they called Hill 3234, where they ambushed and engaged a Mujahideen force numbering over 300 troops. The Soviets, outnumbered heavily, managed to shoot down a large number of the Mujahideen, but in the end, only four Soviet troops made it to the top of the hill, one of them wounded. The wounded man died before he could detonate a grenade he was given, and the two other men were gunned down. However, two Soviet Hind helicopters arrived and were able to gun down and blow up the Mujahideen attackers using the minigun and missiles, and forced the Mujahideen to retreat. In the end, Lutayev was the lone survivor of his squad.