Word: boldak
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Commander Mamabaidullah switches off the ignition and alights from his pickup truck onto the desert plain surrounding Spin Boldak, a chaotic Afghan town that borders Pakistan. Followed by four of his Kalashnikov-toting men, he walks briskly toward a graveyard where scores of bodies lie buried beneath mounds of dirt and clay. Mamabaidullah, who is responsible for guarding this stretch of frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan, stops at the row closest to the border. With evident pride, he explains that they contain the corpses of Taliban militiamen killed by Afghan soldiers during a battle last month. These Taliban, Mamabaidullah says...
...Mamabaidullah's office overlooks one of this battle's front lines: Spin Boldak's main border checkpoint, a notorious smugglers' route from the Pakistani town of Chaman. Entering or leaving the country often requires no papers at all. "It's impossible to control," says Khalid Pashtoon, spokesman for Kandahar Governor Gul Agha Sherzai. It's also the Taliban's gateway to revenge. Following their ouster from Afghanistan, most Taliban leaders found sanctuary among fellow ethnic Pashtuns in Pakistan's lawless Baluchistan and North-West Frontier Province (N.W.F.P.) regions. Pakistani authorities have arrested nearly 500 suspected al-Qaeda members, but Karzai...
...whose wild hills and deep ravines the writ of the central government has never run. But other leads seem to point elsewhere. U.S. warplanes last week dropped leaflets with pictures of bin Laden, offering a $25 million reward for his capture, on the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak, much farther south, and four U.S. intelligence agents carrying satellite phones and bags full of gear arrived at the nearby Pakistani town of Quetta, capital of Baluchistan province. At the same time, persistent reports, denied by Administration officials, came in of a gunfight involving two of bin Laden's sons close...
...battle might never have happened if not for a gruesome stroke of luck. On Jan. 27, U.S. troops and their Afghan allies were conducting random checks outside the city of Spin Boldak, a smuggler's haven near the Pakistani border, when a motorcyclist and his passenger roared past a checkpoint. The Americans and Afghans gave chase down a potholed road stretching across a broad mesa dotted with camels. During the pursuit, the turbaned man on the back of the motorcycle reached under his shawl for a grenade but fumbled it, blowing off his own legs. His comrade, Abdul Ghani, surrendered...
...After the Taliban's defeat in December 2001, Rahim drifted back home to Spin Boldak with no more than five men. But lately, Rahim has grown more dangerous?and apparently much better financed. With cash to burn, allegedly from wealthy patrons of terror in Pakistan, he recruited a band of gunmen from nearby villages?sometimes by force?for a new jihad against the Americans. Rahim's gang planted two explosives in Spin Boldak last month, killing four civilians and injuring scores more. His force swelled to more than 60 fighters, and they raced around Spin Boldak on new motorcycles brought...