Word: hazaras
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...inclusive national government are bedeviled both by Afghanistan's awkward ethnic makeup, and its position at a geopolitical crossroads. There is no majority ethnic group in Afghanistan. The Pashtun are the largest minority, making up some 38 percent of the population, but like the Tajik (25 percent), Hazara (19 percent) and Uzbek (6 percent) they are part of a group whose majority lives in another country. Most Pashtuns live in Pakistan, Tajiks in Tajikistan, Uzbeks in Uzbekistan, and while the Hazaras are not ethnically linked with Iran, their Shiite brand of Islam gives them a common identity with the Islamic...
...fast and far. Retreating into Mazar-i-Sharif's maze of dusty alleys was certain death; the Taliban had made too many enemies. During its three-year rule of Mazar-i-Sharif, the Taliban, who belong to the Pashtun tribes of southern Afghanistan, had mercilessly persecuted the Uzbek and Hazara ethnic minorities. After the city fell, they hauled up guns hidden under the floorboards and took revenge as the Taliban forces fled in disarray. "From the houses, the Uzbeks were picking off the Taliban stragglers," said an Islamabad-based aid worker in contact with the northern Afghan city...
...Taliban soldiers torched villages as they retreated, and there were fears that hundreds of locals?mostly ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazara?may have been barricaded in their burning homes. By Friday morning, when Dostum's troops reached the gates of Mazar, the Alliance said it had taken dozens of Taliban troops captive; many more were on the highway, headed out of town. Across the northern tier of Afghanistan, the Taliban abandoned several garrisons but made fierce efforts to defend others. "When they first arrived here, these fanatics believed they were bulletproof," said an Alliance spokesman. "Now they've been shown...
...fertilizer factory; they believed the U.S. wouldn't hit the factory because doing so could send deadly ammonia fumes into the air. After a meeting with Atta Thursday night, Dostum initiated skirmishes with the Taliban. On Friday morning, the two met with Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq, who commands anti-Taliban Hazara fighters, to plan a three-pronged attack on Taliban positions ringing the city. A group of rebels surprised the Taliban by veering off the main road into Mazar and advancing from the southwest, through a rugged mountain pass known as the "gorge of healing springs." An all-night...