Word: kandahar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...similar incident followed a few months later. Noorzai says he had persuaded a former mujahedin fighter named Haji Birqet Khan, 75, who was close to the Taliban, to come out of hiding in Pakistan and meet with the Americans. But days after Birqet and Noorzai got together in Kandahar, U.S. attack helicopters swooped in and bombarded Birqet's home, killing him and two of his grandchildren. The U.S. claimed it had got wind of a plot by Noorzai and Birqet to attack American forces. Noorzai says that report was erroneous. "He was an innocent man, a tribal leader...
...understand?" Noorzai replied, "I am telling them as much as I know, but I'm not going to say something baseless." The Americans then asked what he knew about al-Qaeda's high command. The answers were not illuminating. Bin Laden? Noorzai admitted to "seeing" him only once, in Kandahar in the late 1990s. What about 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Or Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's chief of military operations? "I'm telling you," Noorzai responded irritably, "I don't know any of the Arabs...
...would Noorzai provide any confirmation for his interrogators' obvious suspicions that he was in the drug business. When pressed about how he made his living, Noorzai said he inherited land in Kandahar from his father and grandfather and owns two large outdoor markets that generate up to $100,000 a year and that if sold would net about $2 million. He flatly denied U.S. intelligence claims that he had received $500 million in Taliban funds from Mullah Omar for safekeeping...
...NATO says 50 dead Taliban?" he would splutter indignantly. "Not one dead, and we killed 50 soldiers." And even if his count rarely matched reality, the chubby-faced 26-year-old knew how to spin a chilling quote, telling TIME last summer, after one particularly brutal suicide bombing in Kandahar had killed eight Afghan laborers working at a nearby military base: "These men were American servants, and they were punished...
Journalists covering devastated corners of the globe are often torn between the desire to stand back and observe or to jump in and help. After three months reporting on the fall of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, National Public Radio's Kandahar correspondent, Sarah Chayes, had had enough of watching the broken country stagger to its feet and decided to lend a hand. Donning the turban and long tunic of Kandahari men (the better to escape attention), she plunged into a new life helping the people of her adopted home. The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban...