Word: atta
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...essential story of Sept. 11 is straightforward. A group of 19 men spent months in the U.S. preparing for the hijackings. The cell had earlier been headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, where its alleged ringleader, an Egyptian named Mohamed Atta, 33, had lived off and on for eight years. Atta is thought to have piloted Flight 11, the first to make impact; two of the other suspected pilots, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah, were also residents of the Hamburg region. The Hamburg cell, in turn, is thought to have been an operating unit of a worldwide network of terrorists...
...outskirts of Mazar, hundreds of the Taliban's 5,000 troops in the region took shelter around a power plant and a fertilizer factory; they believed the U.S. wouldn't hit the factory because doing so could send deadly ammonia fumes into the air. After a meeting with Atta Thursday night, Dostum initiated skirmishes with the Taliban. On Friday morning, the two met with Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq, who commands anti-Taliban Hazara fighters, to plan a three-pronged attack on Taliban positions ringing the city. A group of rebels surprised the Taliban by veering off the main road into Mazar...
...According to accounts given to Time by Alliance officials, 3,500 rebels serving under Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, 47, pushed the Taliban out of Kishindi with a 16-hour assault that left 200 Taliban and an unknown number of Alliance troops dead. To the west, forces loyal to Ustad Atta Mohammed, another Alliance commander, lost 30 men in a barrage of Taliban tank fire but seized the outlying village of Aq Kuprik. From there the Alliance's long-promised and much delayed march on Mazar-i-Sharif gathered an irresistible momentum. Some Taliban soldiers ran and hid, others switched sides...
...Pentagon gets to revealing specifics about its strategy: he acknowledged that the Pentagon was "interested" in Mazar-i-Sharif. Two out of every three bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes last week fell on Taliban lines guarding Mazar. The critical prize was the airport, three miles east of the city; Atta told Time that "taking the airfield is the same as taking Mazar." The runway may serve as a base from which U.S. jets will be able to strike targets within minutes. And the unclogging of the roadways leading into Mazar will help the U.S. build a "land bridge" from Afghanistan...
...storming the city could end up battling one another before the smoke could clear. Dostum, the charismatic warlord who governed Mazar until a Taliban offensive unseated him in 1997, is notorious for his inconstancy and ruthlessness, and he has no intention of ceding authority to the 37-year-old Atta, a rising military star. Atta has curried support like a small-town mayoral candidate, printing up posters of himself to plaster around the city, and Dostum is likely to take that as an affront. "There's a war within a war here," says Dostum aide Sayed Kamil. The area...