Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When a woman wearing a blue burqa showed up near the Kabul airport three days after the Taliban fled the capital last November, no one gave her a second glance. But heads turned when she marched up to the Northern Alliance soldiers guarding air force headquarters and demanded to be let in. "Go home, Auntie," said the guards, shooing her away. "Get out, go home." The petite woman didn't budge. "I am not your aunt!" she shouted, tearing off her burqa and tossing it to the ground. "I train soldiers. I am Khatol!" Hearing that name, the guards apologized...
...only their first name) was among those hardest hit by the Taliban's ban on women's employment. Although she is better educated than most Afghan women--as few as 5.6% are literate--Khatol's options under the fundamentalist regime became as narrow as those for many of Kabul's 30,000-plus other war widows. The Taliban's restrictions on its female population were infamously harsh: girls could not attend school; and women, except for some doctors and nurses, were prohibited from working. The mullahs further isolated women by forcing them to cover themselves head to toe in burqas...
...free fall before her parachute opens and carries her safely to the ground. She did her first jump in six years in March as part of the official celebration of Nawroz, the Afghan new-year holiday that the Taliban had banned. She was supposed to land in the Kabul stadium, but the helicopter mistakenly dropped her in a nearby field instead. Unfazed, she gathered up her parachute, hailed a battered old taxi and rode to the stadium, where a cheering crowd greeted her as she made her entrance. "I felt I would start a new life again, a good life...
...support and prevented his extremist fire from spreading. Not only did the Muslim troops of the Afghan opposition fight with renewed determination against bin Laden's Taliban hosts after Sept. 11, but some of Islam's most influential scholars and clerics began refusing to give their support to the Kabul regime. Egyptian Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is host of a religious program on the pan-Arab television channel al-Jazeera, issued a statement condemning the suicide attacks. Such acts helped refute the jihad pretenses of al-Qaeda and the Taliban and rob them of all transnational Islamic support...
Person of the Week As president of strife-torn Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai is on the hit lists of some of the world's most dangerous warlords and terrorists. On Thursday, Karzai narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in Kandahar, just hours after a car bomb killed 30 people in Kabul. Karzai later remarked, "I expect things like this to happen...