Word: desertions
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hasty meeting as Alliance fighters converged on the dusty square outside, readying their pickups and rocket launchers for battle. A small unit of American special forces arrived, and their commander slipped inside. A few minutes later, the Alliance chiefs jumped into their jeeps and sped across the desert, trailed by 5,000 troops. Dostum scrambled up an ancient mud mound and raised his binoculars: on the horizon a thin line of black dots showed where the Taliban was waiting...
...strife. Pashtun farmers have lived in the northern plains around Mazar-i-Sharif for a century, but now many have had enough. With 32 other families, a farmer named Saidu walked for 15 days through cannon fire and biting wind to reach a bleak refugee camp in the Pashtun desert of the south. "I've suffered too much," he said. "I'm not going back up north, not if [Northern Alliance leader Burhanuddin] Rabbani is ruler or Dostum. They'll kill us Pashtun." The country could yet fracture along north-south lines as tribes coalesce in their home regions...
...bright, warm Saturday, 300 Taliban soldiers who had fled the American bombardment of Kunduz, their last stronghold in the north of Afghanistan, laid down their weapons in the desert a few miles to the north of Mazar-i-Sharif. They surrendered to Northern Alliance General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who crowed that his forces had achieved a "great victory" as the pows were herded 50 at a time onto flatbed trucks...
...would probably be an even bigger mistake to send the U.S. Marines into Kandahar. Having marines in their desert fatigues strolling victoriously through the dusty lanes of Kandahar, while residents cower from the doorways, might play well for the Bush Administration back home, but it would go against U.S. strategy to date: helping Afghans free themselves from the Taliban rule. This endgame may look like a stalemate, but the best tactic may be to keep putting pressure on the Taliban, maybe move the marines closer to Kandahar and keep up the accurate bombing on Taliban targets...
...building opened fire. Alliance soldiers patrolling the area swiftly dispatched them. In all, Atta's troops had taken 175 prisoners; Dostum's, 150. The Red Cross said it had recovered close to 400 bodies from the burned-out building. Workers ferried the corpses, dusted in ghostly white, into the desert to be buried in mass graves. Mohaqiq's force of ethnic Hazara Shi'ites, who had borne the brunt of the Taliban's murderous rule, would not specify how many captives they took or what had happened to them. But some 200 of the 900 Taliban fighters remained unaccounted...