Chatkal buries "the Ghost"

CHATKAL VALLEY — Kuban Mamytov, the herder whose riders harried socialist supply columns in the mountain passes during the siege of Talas in 1992, was buried on Sunday in the Chatkal valley, where he had returned to his flocks after the war. He was born in 1949. As is the custom, he was buried on the day of his death.

As his coffin was carried from the family's winter house, his horse was led behind the bier with its saddle reversed, in keeping with the Fallen Rider tradition. Several hundred mourners followed it, among them men who had ridden with him twenty-one years ago. A Syro-Iradi priest led the prayers.

A veteran of the Soviet Army, Mamytov led riders from the Chatkal clans into Talas during the Winter Uprising of 1992. When socialist forces besieged the city from April, the Provisional Government gave him command of the mounted irregulars defending its southern approaches. His men attacked depots along the railway and kept open the mountain tracks by which supplies reached the city from the southern valleys. Veterans called him "the Ghost of Chatkal". After US forces disarmed the militias in August 1992 he went back to herding, and in 1994 he declined a commission in the new Irad National Guard.

"He never wanted a uniform after 1992," said Kalysbek Tursun uulu, who rode with him during the siege. "He said the horse had done its work and so had he."