Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...towns of Tashkurghan and Hairatan and zeroed in on Kunduz, one of the last Taliban strongholds in northern Afghanistan. A senior Alliance official told Time that the Alliance now controls the northwest and has advanced as far south as Pul-i-Khumri--100 miles away from the capital, Kabul. The official said Taliban soldiers stranded in Kunduz and further east in Taloqan have been cut off from fresh supplies. On Saturday the Alliance launched an assault near Taloqan, hoping to seize the heavily defended city and then coordinate its forces with those moving east from Mazar to strangle the Taliban...
...action may be shifting south. Late last week both sides mobilized in preparation for a trench battle for control of the air base at Bagram--the front north of Kabul. "We will advance to the gates of Kabul within two weeks," predicts a senior rebel officer. Sources told Time that the Alliance, which is outnumbered 2 to 1 by Taliban forces around Kabul, has asked for close air support from American attack helicopters. So far, the Pentagon has demurred, but AH-64 Apache choppers are already suspected to be in the region, with...
...Taliban vulnerability. "These folks are aggressive," U.S. Marine General Peter Pace said Wednesday. "They're taking the war to their enemy--and ours." For the Alliance, the war's critical turn came early this month when U.S. B-52s began hammering Taliban front lines dug in near Mazar and Kabul and further north, along the Tajik border. Despite U.S. frustration with the Alliance's sluggishness, the complexity of waging war in an alien, booby-trapped environment gave Pentagon strategists little choice but to embrace the rebels as a proxy ground force. For the first time, the Pentagon last week acknowledged...
...hellacious counterattack. "It's not very surprising, given the heavy U.S. bombings, that they pulled out of Mazar," says Rifaat Hussain, head of defense and strategic studies at Islamabad's Quaid-i-Azam University. "If the Taliban choose to fight a real battle, it will be over Kabul." The capital is the destination of choice for the 20,000 militants who have crossed the border from Pakistan to fight for the Taliban...
...Alliance has its own elite corps deployed near Kabul. Visiting Western journalists often portray the Alliance's militia of part-time, agrarian soldiers as representative of the rebel force as a whole. But that picture is misleading. A zarbati, or strike unit, of some 1,200 uniformed, well-trained fighters is massed north of the capital. The best of the bunch, the Guards Brigade, was created by the late mujahedin commander Ahmed Shah Massoud--even in death the spiritual leader of the Northern Alliance--and comprises several infantry assault battalions backed up by Russian T-55 and T-62 tanks...