Word: boldak
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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...
...Taliban minister who later allied himself with the Northern Alliance, says Talibs are warned by their peers that "they'll be sent to Guant?namo" if they return. Or, he adds, "[the Taliban] pay people to join their jihad." Mullah Nik Mohammed, a Taliban commander captured in Spin Boldak, told his interrogators that he would have received $850 for detonating a bomb, double that if it killed a civilian, and $2,600 for taking a soldier's life...
...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...
...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...