Word: abdullah
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Moving east to Afghanistan, we bemoaned the withdrawal of presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah, the chief opponent of President Hamid Karzai, from a hotly contested race plagued by allegations of fraud, terming the decision premature. Abdullah’s concession to Karzai dispossessed the Afghan government of any democratic legitimacy, thus depriving the country of much-needed stability. The implication of this politically expedient maneuver, we concluded, was that the United States could not afford to factor in the chimerical prospect of a stable democracy in Afghanistan as it considers its policy toward the region...
...militias and political parties ever since. Iran won't be the only country likely to flex its muscles after the election. Turkey - which has a restive Kurdish minority of its own - will try to block any further devolution of power to Kurdistan. And last month, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah invited leaders of a pro-Sunni coalition to visit Riyadh, a sign that the kingdom would like to play a role as protector of Iraq's Sunnis. "Everyone in the region will try to occupy Iraq," says Sheik Hussam al-Mojammai, the head of Baqubah's Awakening Council, a Sunni...
...Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul and Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef were both held by the U.S. at Guantánamo. Both were senior Taliban commanders, and both say they were subjected to solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, countless interrogations and beatings. But when they were released back home in their native Afghanistan, the two men's paths diverged radically...
...Seared by the humiliations of Guantánamo, Rasoul immediately rejoined the Taliban insurgency, bent on revenge. Better known by his nom de guerre, Mullah Abdullah Zakir, he is now believed by Afghan and NATO intelligence officers to be the Taliban's new field commander, responsible for a string of bombings and ambushes in southern Afghanistan over the past year that have killed dozens of NATO troops (and which killed more than 30 people in a series of bombings in Kandahar over the weekend). He is believed to have assumed overall responsibility for Taliban military operations from the movement...
...Turkey has remained calm this week. Although the army's chief of staff, Ilker Basbug, denounced the allegations, he also held meetings with Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul to discuss the arrests and said coups "are a thing of the past." The country's generals have also all returned to their posts without incident. "If 49 people at the head of Turkey's founding institution can become the object of an investigation, this means Turkey has crossed a historic threshold," says Cengiz Candar, a political commentator for the Radikal newspaper in Istanbul. "This is a catharsis...