Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...President for failing to take a stand to eliminate a weapon that kills more than 20,000 people, mostly civilian, every year, often long after a military confrontation has ended. Thousands of people continue to be maimed, for example, by mines put in place long ago in Cambodia, Afghanistan, and more recently in Bosnia and Croatia. "This is a failure of U.S. leadership but it will not stop the international effort to ban these weapons," said Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, who had lobbied Clinton on behalf of the ban. An international ban on land mines was rejected at a conference...
Some powerful facts support that assertion. Perhaps 110 million mines lurk in 64 nations around the world, and each year they kill or maim about 30,000 people, usually civilians. The heaviest concentrations of mines are in poor countries like Cambodia, Somalia, Bosnia, Mozambique, Afghanistan and Angola that have survived years or even decades of civil war. Five million new mines are laid each year, and only 100,000 are cleared. A new mine costs $3; uprooting one costs between...
...first his work was political. He recruited thousands of Arab fighters in the Gulf, paid for their passage to Afghanistan and set up the main guerrilla camp to train them. Later he designed and constructed defensive tunnels and ditches along the Pakistani border, driving a bulldozer and exposing himself to strafing from Soviet helicopter gunships. Before long, he had taken up a Kalashnikov and was going into battle. In 1986 he and a few dozen Arab defenders fought off a Soviet onslaught in a town called Jaji, not far from the Pakistani border. To Arabs...
...hero to us because he was always on the front line, always moving ahead of everybody else," recalls Hamza Mohammed, a Palestinian volunteer in Afghanistan who now manages one of bin Laden's construction projects in Sudan. "He not only gave his money, but he also gave himself. He came down from his palace to live with the Afghan peasants and the Arab fighters. He cooked with them, ate with them, dug trenches with them. That was bin Laden...
...Laden's view, armed infidels in the holy land were a desecration of Islam. After publicly criticizing the regime and becoming the target of a harassment campaign, he fled to Sudan in 1991. A sizable contingent of "Afghan Arabs"--Arabs from various countries who fought in Afghanistan--followed him and found work with his companies...