Word: kabul
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...former deputy Interior Minister of the Taliban says he has a lot of information to give up, perhaps even some that will lead to Mullah Omar, the fugitive leader of Afghanistan's fallen regime and chief ally of Osama bin Laden. But, until TIME alerted U.S. military officials in Kabul in late January of his willingness to talk, no American officials had debriefed Khaksar. Two weeks after, no senior U.S. intelligence official had spoken...
...wanted to find the ex-Taliban deputy interior minister, all they had to do was ask the baker at Kabul's diplomatic enclave of Wazir Akbar Khan. The baker drags a flat-iron shaped nan bread from the wood-fired oven, and brushing flour from his hands, points down to a lane of high-walled villas, all with marble facades. These villas are among the city's few spoils of war, and they are grabbed by a new set of commanders every time the city changes hands. When the Taliban fled Kabul, Khaksar, elected to stay behind in his villa...
...money, and if the assassin dies in completing his mission, the money will go to the assassin's family," Khaksar says. He sits at a desk with a picture of the late Northern Alliance hero, Ahmed Shah Massoud, on his desk, perhaps insurance in case the current rulers of Kabul might begin to doubt his loyalties. As a Taliban, he publicly enforced an edict banning television but he has one prominently displayed in his office. "Even as a Taliban, I had a TV," grinned Khaksar, "but I had to keep it hidden...
...death threats made the ex-Taliban frantic want to see the Americans. Five times he sent letters to the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul, he says, offering to meet the diplomats. Khaksar said he was ready to pass on information that might lead to the capture of the fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar and to some al-Qaeda hideouts in Afghanistan. But he waited days, weeks, months and nobody contacted him. It's possible that his letters never got to CIA agents inside the embassy. Security at the US embassy compound is on a war alert, with snipers...
Orders to abduct women came from the Taliban leaders, say the Kabul police, but not all commanders obeyed. In the Shomali Plain, Taliban commander Nuruludah says, he saw women being forced onto trucks by Pakistani members of al-Qaeda, so he gathered 10 men, ambushed the trucks and released the women. In Jalalabad too, a few local Taliban eventually stormed the camp and freed the women who remained there. These were the heroic exceptions. For others, apparently, the profound degradation of women seemed perfectly tolerable...