Word: dostum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...strongmen don't come any stronger than General Abdul Rashid Dostum. A former communist general known to have ordered enemy captives crushed under a Russian tank, Dostum, 49, is trying to transform himself from warlord into smiling presidential candidate. That's going to take some finesse, given that he strikes fear in many Afghans in his northern stronghold of Shebarghan. Dostum's idea of campaigning is to sit on a thronelike chair in his rose garden and scowl at a line of deferential tribal elders, officials and militia commanders who will be expected to deliver votes from among the Uzbeks...
...straggles by, carrying a blanket full of long grass over his shoulder, food for the sheep he tends. He says he was captured in Kunduz and, like thousands of other prisoners, stuffed into a shipping container and ferried to Sheberghan by troops loyal to warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. Hundreds died in the heat inside those metal boxes. Shown pictures of the prisoners, Nurzai names three he recognizes. "I was an innocent," he says, claiming he had been conscripted into the Taliban army months earlier. But moments later he admits he volunteered for service four years...
...straggles by, carrying a blanket full of long grass over his shoulder, food for the sheep he tends. He says he was captured in Kunduz and, like thousands of other prisoners, stuffed into a shipping container and ferried to Sheberghan by troops loyal to warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. Hundreds died in the heat inside those metal boxes. Shown pictures of the prisoners, Nurzai names three he recognizes. "I was an innocent," he says, claiming he had been conscripted into the Taliban army months earlier. But moments later he admits he volunteered for service four years...
...murders of three opponents to the fundamentalist movement in Quetta in Pakistan in the mid-1990s. A veteran of the Kunduz and Takhar fronts during the Taliban's civil war with the United Front, Rehman was captured last year by the forces of northern warlord General Rashid Dostum. He was released earlier this year, most likely after his family paid the almost $900 ransom that was demanded to free each of the Taliban captives. Rahman returned to his village but soon after moved south to Kandahar. There he "used all his efforts to join the security forces and become...
...itself more and more in Afghanistan?caught between backing regional strongmen who will help root out al-Qaeda, and the people Karzai has sent out to build a coherent Afghan nation. Two weeks ago, both U.S. officials and Karzai's government were embarrassed by reports that Uzbek commander Rashid Dostum, who worked closely with U.S. special forces around Mazar-i-Sharif during the early part of the anti-Taliban war, might have suffocated Taliban POWs in shipping containers and buried their bodies in mass graves. Zadran is the Dostum of Afghanistan's southeast, an unsavory but necessary ally...