Word: kabul
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...stomach-clutching thud of an explosion rolled across Kabul at around 9pm last Saturday. It began with a flash in a small garbage pile on a grassy common outside a sprawling Soviet-era tenement. The building is home to several hundred families in the suburb of Microyan, and the detonation, only thirty yards from the ground floor apartments, shattered every window facing the park in the crumbling five-story block. Sleeping children woke terrified, coated in shards of glass. A three-year-old stood by her mother, her face laced with tiny cuts. Two or three people were reported injured...
...nothing is ever quite as it seems in Kabul. The defense ministry building against whose wall the bomb had been left was not an empty set of offices; it's the headquarters of Afghan military intelligence. At the time of the explosion General Zahir Akbar, the country's military intelligence chief, was at his large varnished desk scribbling orders on scraps of paper. Though the building was all but empty, it seems as if someone knew he would be there. "He was the target," one of his aides told TIME amid the debris of the general's office minutes after...
...Though he owes his position to the powerful defense minister, Mohammed Qasim Fahim, it's possible others in the defense minister's circle perceive Akbar as a political rival. As the general's staff pointed out, U.S. officers and senior brass from the International Security Assistance Force that protects Kabul are frequent visitors to his busy headquarters. It suggests a level influence likely to cause jealousy in the internecine world of Afghan military affairs. "It was someone out to get the general," an aide said, dismissing the notion of terrorist involvement...
...Muramza, 24, fought the Northern Alliance in and around Kabul. Asked who his commander was, he points to a heavy-breathing bear of a man, who angrily responds, "Why did you tell them that?" Several Tanali men are being held at Sheberghan prison in the north, and several more died in the fighting in Mazar-i-Sharif. One who made it home is Nurzai, 24, who 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...
...Intelligence operatives from Kandahar and the capital Kabul spent two weeks dredging over Rehman's past, scouring it for any hints as to who might have ordered or arranged the hit. An Afghan intelligence report, filed last week and examined by TIME identifies Rehman as Abdul Razaq, a Taliban assassin believed responsible for the 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...