Word: defectives
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...week became a showplace for the trickery and betrayal at the heart of Afghan warfare. On Monday the Northern Alliance commander, Mohammed Dawood Khan, was expecting a rout. His troops were chasing Taliban soldiers down the road from Taloqan to Kunduz, and a key Taliban commander had promised to defect. The Taliban's hard-core Arab fighters, however, had other ideas. As Dawood's troops got out of their trucks at the village of Bangi, about 30 miles east of Kunduz, they were ambushed by Taliban forces hidden in the village. As the advancing Alliance column turned on its tail...
...Taliban tank fire but seized the outlying village of Aq Kuprik. From there the Alliance's long-promised and much delayed march on Mazar-i-Sharif gathered an irresistible momentum. Some Taliban soldiers ran and hid, others switched sides. One Taliban commander on the front lines secretly arranged to defect with a few hundred of his men and agreed to let the Alliance through his line. The advancing rebels found another Taliban commander, Mullah Qahir, trying to avoid capture by snipping off his beard with nail scissors. He wasn't the only one. "From what I hear," said an Alliance...
...been taught to me. I wanted to do something real." Convinced that was no longer possible in China, Yan Ming slipped out of his hotel the night after his last gig, found a taxi and tried to tell the driver in his nonexistent English that he wanted to defect...
...opportunity to prove that we had made progress, that we had defeated the first Nazi threat on our soil. Hoover in particular wanted to maximize the public relations value of the arrests: He kept secret for a few years that it was two of the saboteurs, who, hoping to defect, had alerted the FBI to the plan, not prodigious agents...
...what they once did best: battle a more powerful foreign force from redoubts in the mountains, where tanks can't go and helicopters crash. The surviving Taliban could still withdraw to avoid the hellfire of American strikes and then spring ambushes on towns and villages below. "They can defect, change their mind and go back," Rumsfeld said. "It is not possible to answer the question as to the circumstance of the Taliban." But their divisions are scattered, their hard-core fighters are few--Pakistani sources say 2,000 members, at most, of Omar's 50,000-strong force are still...