Word: azad
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...workers, foreign volunteers, Islamic extremists and soldiers (Pakistan alone has committed about 40,000 troops to relief efforts). In some cases, old adversaries have set aside their enormous differences, at least for now. Before the quake, the mountain valleys of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir were off-limits to outsiders. Called Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir) by the Pakistanis, the area was cordoned off by the army because, in the decades-long conflict with India for control of Kashmir, Azad was an unofficial war zone. The bus stations and grungy hotels of Muzaffarabad swarmed with secret police on the prowl for unwelcome strangers...
...guerrilla warfare and slipped them across the Line of Control?the unofficial border between the Pakistani and Indian areas of Kashmir?to ambush troops, Hindu civilians and politicians on the Indian side. President Pervez Musharraf, under pressure from the U.S. after 9/11, says he closed the camps in Azad Kashmir. But as recently as last August, according to sources in the militant groups, bands of guerrillas were still crossing over the Line of Control, dodging Indian land mines and patrols...
...quake has changed everything. The necessity of coping with the devastation in Azad Kashmir has strengthened the precarious cease-fire and forced the Pakistanis to open up. On the mountainsides where thousands of refugee tents have sprouted between collapsed buildings, the U.S. military is delivering drinking water to camps run by "Axis of Evil" nemesis Iran; U.S. and NATO soldiers flirt with Cuban nurses. But the most surreal partnership of all is between the U.S. military and Islamic militants from groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba, branded by Washington as terrorists. Bemused to find himself at daily briefings in Muzaffarabad with...
...such a widespread manner. Nearly every rung of society is being terrorized. Truck drivers are assaulted on the roads; leading businessmen have been kidnapped for ransom; journalists have been tortured and murdered; and one of the nation's pre-eminent intellectuals, Humayun Azad, was almost killed in February by a gang of knife-wielding assailants. But the wake-up call for many Bangladeshis came last week, when the bodies of two cloth merchants were found beheaded and mutilated in a forest outside Dhaka. Stunned by the discovery, many traders in the city closed their shops or held rallies to highlight...
...their homes, warn them to pack up and leave for India and, for good measure, extort ransom from them. "The condition of religious minorities has become terrible under the present government," says Subrata Chowdhury, a Dhaka-based Hindu human-rights lawyer. The brutal attack on well-known intellectual Azad, a moderate Muslim who is an outspoken critic of Islamic fundamentalism, has also led many in Bangladesh's intelligentsia to believe that they too are now being systematically targeted by Islamic radicals because they advocate secularism and tolerance. "How can you have intellectual freedom when you don't know whether...