Word: atta
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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TIME's Alex Perry was one of the first journalists to enter Mazar-i-Sharif after it fell to the Northern Alliance. There he met Ustad Mohammed Atta, a general who helped drive out the Taliban, and learned of the bloody aftermath of the city's fall. Read Alex's account at time.com/perry...
...first western reporters to reach Mazar-i-Sharif, I was ushered into the home of Ustad Atta Mohammed, the Northern Alliance commander who--along with warlords Rashid Dostum and Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq--had taken the city a few days before. An ethnic Tajik, Atta, 37, is a bearded giant given to joking and easy small talk. He invited me to sit on his carpet and share a meal of qabeli, the Afghan national dish of rice, raisins, mutton, carrots and onions. In the past week, he has established himself as the unofficial mayor of Mazar, presiding over meetings of tribal...
...Atta and his security chief, Wasiq, described how Mazar had been taken, it became clear that this fighting had finished only hours before I arrived. They told me about Sultan Raziya, a girls' school in the southeast part of the city, where Pakistani "tourists," as they called them, had held out until late Tuesday. Reports of a massacre there had filtered out of Mazar the weekend before. "Many people died there," said Wasiq. "We had to kill many." I asked if I could visit the site. Wasiq smiled and said I would have to get permission from Atta...
...sifting the rubble and transferring bodies and pieces of bodies onto a flatbed tractor trailer. The stench of death hung across the ruins. The team concentrated on intact bodies that could be lifted by the arms and legs. There had been more than 300 of them so far. With Atta's permission, I was given free rein to climb through the rubble, stepping past corpse after corpse, many of them dismembered. Elsewhere, fire had reduced everything--furniture, clothing, people...
...interviews with Atta, Wasiq and dozens of their men and civilian eyewitnesses from the neighborhood around the school, I was able to piece together a full account of what happened...