Word: abdul
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...nights of fall settled on northeast Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Massoud was barely hanging on. His summer offensive had been a bust. An attempt to capture the city of Taloqan, which he had lost to the Taliban in 2000, ended in failure. But old allies, like the brutal Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, had returned to the field, and Massoud still thought the unpopularity of the Taliban might yet make them vulnerable. "He was telling us not to worry, that we'd soon capture Kabul," says Shah Pacha, an infantry commander in the Northern Alliance...
Only once did something happen that might have given Massoud hope that the U.S. would help. In late June, he was joined in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, by Abdul Haq, a leading Pashtun, based in Dubai, who was opposed to the Taliban. Haq was accompanied by someone Massoud knew well: Peter Tomsen, a retired ambassador who from 1989 to '92 had been the U.S. State Department's special envoy to the Afghan resistance. Also present was James Ritchie, a successful Chicago options trader who had spent part of his childhood in Afghanistan and was helping bankroll the groups opposed to the Taliban...
...influence in the Muslim world is based on its stewardship of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Islam. The al-Saud family has held on to power by placating the kingdom's religious establishment, which is dominated by descendants of the 18th century Muslim cleric Mohammed bin Abdul Wahhab. To defuse the religious leaders' hostility to modernization, the Sauds gave the Wahhabists broad power to dispense their forbidding brand of Islam in the country's mosques and schools and to regulate daily life in the kingdom. During the five daily prayer times, official morality squads roam streets...
...Pakistani undercover intelligence officer, Abdul Rauf Niazi was trained to keep his nerve. But as he sat in the backseat of a minivan last month, tearing through the badlands along the Afghan border with four heavily armed al-Qaeda members beside him, Niazi may have sensed he was riding to his death. Niazi had spent weeks befriending Uzbek al-Qaeda fighters, posing as a smuggler who could take them safely into the frontier city of Peshawar. Now he had lured the Uzbeks into the trap. He would drive them into an ambush in which Pakistani police would capture al-Qaeda...
...influence in the Muslim world is based on its stewardship of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Islam. The al-Saud family has held on to power by placating the kingdom's religious establishment, which is dominated by descendants of the 18th century Muslim cleric Mohammed bin Abdul Wahhab. To defuse the religious leaders' hostility to modernization, the Sauds gave the Wahhabists broad power to dispense their forbidding brand of Islam in the country's mosques and schools and to regulate daily life in the kingdom. During the five daily prayer times, official morality squads roam streets...