Word: kabul
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Gunshots echoed through the granite halls of Kabul's People' House, punctuating a fresh installment in Afghanistan's long history of violence and political intrigue. When the Shootout was over, some 60 people lay dead, including, apparently, President Noor Mohammed Taraki. The new leader of the strife-torn country was Hafizullah Amin, 50, most recently President Taraki's Prime Minister. Within hours, workers in the mile-high capital had stripped hundreds of outsize portraits of Taraki from the facades of state office buildings. Many of the red-bordered images of Afghanistan's "Great Leader...
...launched a radical program of social reform and land redistribution. The policy met with violent resistance from the country's Islamic tribesmen, who make up some 85% of Afghanistan's 17 million people. Loyal to their old feudal leaders and enraged by the new, "godless" regime in Kabul, Muslim guerrillas launched a civil war that has kept the Soviet-backed Khalq government tottering on the brink of collapse ever since. Western diplomats in Kabul estimate that the rebels control 22 of the country's 28 provinces...
...when the smoke cleared an hour later, Amin was in control of the palace and the traitor Taron and dozens of others were dead. On Sunday the Revolutionary Council announced that Taraki had resigned on "health grounds" and reassigned his posts to Amin. At week's end, the Kabul government still had not confirmed Taraki's death, but, considering Afghanistan's tradition of violent political change, it was hard to imagine that he was still alive...
...army. But the rebellion has spread to 15 of the country's 28 provinces, and while guerrilla activity is most intense in the remote areas bordering on Iran in the west and Pakistan in the east, the regime has been forced to tighten security everywhere. Foreign diplomats in Kabul reckon that more than 12,000 political prisoners have been jailed. Major intersections in the capital, where an 11 p.m. curfew is in effect, are patrolled by soldiers, and the country's few highways are under heavy guard; eight police checkpoints dot the 115-mile route from the Khyber...
Taraki, 62, a sometime journalist who heads Afghanistan's Khalq (People's) Party, does not have broad backing; some diplomats in Kabul believe his supporters in the military and among Afghanistan's small educated class number only 2,500 people. Yet the regime shows no sign of bending its rigid Marxist principles. While Taraki professes "full respect for holy Islam," his Prime Minister, Hafizullah Amin, angrily blames the bloodletting on the meddling of "imperialist lackeys from Iran and Pakistan...