Word: bins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Bin Laden has steadily extended his influence with the Taliban while it lets him turn Afghanistan into a training ground for terror. It was bin Laden, says Ahmed Rashid, longtime reporter and expert on the Taliban, who brought anti-Americanism to the nationalistic Taliban ideology. Intelligence sources say bin Laden's men have infiltrated the Taliban's top ministries, especially Virtue and Vice, where they are said to have argued vigorously for the destruction of the Buddhas. Russia's Foreign Ministry has even reported that bin Laden was unofficially serving as the Taliban's Defense Minister. Bin Laden has allied...
...bin Laden is the bull's-eye in America's target, the Taliban is the next concentric ring, the masters of a country that has played host not just to the world's most wanted terrorist but also to thousands of jihadis who flock there to learn the tricks of the trade. Out of their harsh version of "pure" Islam and to keep themselves in power, the Taliban has made of Afghanistan a mecca of terrorism, a land whose aura of Islam ascendant lures volunteers from a vast pool of Muslims who want to partake of Afghanistan's great victory...
...confront its nuclear rival more conventionally on the ground. So the U.S. armed and financed a proxy army. The band of mujahedin, or holy warriors, that the U.S. backed came not just from the fractious, ethnically diverse Afghan tribes but also from cadres of Muslim volunteers--including Osama bin Laden--who saw resistance against the Soviets as a God-ordered defense of Islam. And they won, sending the utterly demoralized Soviet army home...
Stalled at the gates of Kabul, the Taliban found an enthusiastic new benefactor. Osama bin Laden, who had spent some of his family fortune to finance the anti-Soviet mujahedin, needed a new home after Sudan succumbed to U.S. blandishments to kick him out. In exchange for a haven in Afghanistan's switchback valleys and rugged passes, bin Laden offered the Taliban money and fighters. Afghan and Western sources say he gave $3 million that helped push the Taliban into control of the capital and the country in September 1996. It was, according to intelligence reports, one of the last...
...Afghans drawn to bin Laden are said to make up a 1,000-strong brigade fighting as part of training on the front line in the Taliban's ongoing war with the Northern Alliance. The soldiers are not just Arab militants from dozens of Middle Eastern countries aspiring to change secular regimes into Taliban-style states but are revolutionaries from Uzbekistan and Uighur separatists from China as well. U.S. officials believe that bin Laden masterminded the Sept. 9 assassination of the leading military commander of the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Taliban's chief rival for national power...