Word: bora
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...three local commanders intent on winning the $25 million bounty on Osama bin Laden. Accompanying Zahir's fighters on their hunt, I rummaged through what was probably the last of bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan. It was in the Milawa Valley section of Tora Bora, in the shadow of the majestic White Mountains. Just below it lie a series of man-made caves stuffed with arms and weapons, while above it is a ridge with more caves where bin Laden was thought to be hiding...
...strong horse." Here he was indeed prophetic: the mistake was in not knowing which mount was which. In the month since he savored his triumph, the army of Taliban faithful has collapsed. If the scouts are right, he has had to flee to the deepest recess of a Tora Bora cave. His prediction of inflamed and inspired Muslims flocking to his cause was refuted by the quiet of the Arab streets and the murmur of clerics who denounced his acts. The superpower that was supposed to cringe and flail instead sent its best warriors to search and destroy...
...cold satisfaction to think of him entombed in a crushed mountain, just as his victims were three months ago. But Tora Bora is not likely to become a sacred shrine of Islam, and his caves will not be the holiest place in Afghanistan. It is the World Trade Center site that has become hallowed ground and the secular values of a free nation that inspired the unity, charity and victory he imagined. It was not just his army that was routed, but his dreams. He made his tape; now we are making ours...
...Even with the Taliban gone, bin Laden has the right connections to disappear. His fairy godfather in the Tora Bora region is a warlord named Younis Khalis, who invited him to Afghanistan in 1996 after even Sudan didn't want him. Khalis lives in an adobe compound a short distance from Jalalabad on the road to Tora Bora. He was close with the Taliban, which used his land as a parking lot for its tanks - more than a dozen of them were blown apart by US missiles and now lie wrecked on Khalis's land. Khalis himself...
...This is all speculation, of course. It is possible that bin Laden is long gone. Sources who say he was in Tora Bora in the first place are notoriously unreliable. Local commanders grew more certain he was here the more they thought the U.S. would pay them to fight. The Pentagon said it heard him on a radio but that can be faked. People living near his city home in Jalalabad can't agree whether they have seen him in recent years, and Al-Qaeda prisoners say he fled two weeks...