Word: kabul
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Five years after collapse of the Taliban, the streets of Kabul are typically clogged with land cruisers transporting foreigners or newly minted drug lords. Ordinary Afghans, however, still live much as they did before - with sewage flowing through open gutters at the side of the street, no running water and working electricity only about every two or three days...
...That growing gap between Afghanistan's haves and have-nots helps explain why a U.S. military convoy accident triggered riots that engulfed Kabul on Monday, leaving at least 14 people dead, over 100 injured and millions of dollars of damage. It was the worst violence to sweep the Afghan capital since the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban, and in the process, it shattered the illusion that the city would remain untouched by the growing unrest in the south and east - as well as the notion that the Taliban or its sympathizers were the only violent threat to the Western presence...
...many frustrated young men were already looking for a provocation. "Underlying it all is the fact that young men have not seen any tangible change in their lives in terms of either jobs or basic services," said aid worker Holly Ritchie, who works for a British charity in Kabul. Much of their anger is directed squarely at the very people ostensibly in the country to help, the foreign aid agencies who oversee a portion of the billions of dollars in aid money that has flowed into the country in the last four years...
...never expected anything of this scale. It was totally unprecedented in Kabul. We were here during the mujahedin and Taliban years and have never seen anything like it," said Paul Barker, the director of CARE Afghanistan. The offices of the relief agency were looted and burned to the ground, along with those of French aid agency ACTED and a number of Afghan restaurants and businesses. On Tuesday, four Afghan aid workers with the charity Action Aid were killed in the first targeted attack on an NGO in northern Jawzjan province, which like Kabul, had previously been viewed as stable. "People...
...their daily lot, the Taliban are no longer the only anti-government forces that the U.S. has to worry about. It was young men allied to the Taliban?s arch-foes - the heroes of the Northern Alliance who ousted the ultra-Islamic regime - that were major agitators in the Kabul violence. Many of the demonstrators were carrying portraits of ethnic Tajik Afghan resistance hero Ahmad Shah Massoud, assassinated by the Taliban a day before the September 11 attacks...