Word: kandahar
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...Taliban, for Osama bin Laden and his dwindling legion of lieutenants, Tora Bora is the last sanctuary. The Taliban's barbaric and medieval rule unraveled for good last week as the regime's soldiers fled from Kandahar, their last stronghold. Some skulked back to their home villages with the idea of starting new lives. Others, like Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, went missing. As a fresh power struggle raged in Kandahar and a new Afghan government prepared to take over in Kabul, the black turbans and medieval strictures of Taliban rule began to seem like...
...more elusive the closer you get to them, and victory doesn't necessarily bring the promised spoils. The conflict in Afghanistan has confounded expectations. Who anticipated that the Taliban's rule would disintegrate wholesale two months into the U.S. bombing campaign? Or that the regime's soldiers would abandon Kandahar as meekly and abruptly as they did, quitting the city in the dead of night...
...More U.S. special forces were inside Kandahar, bivouacked behind the blue arched Governor's House. They rode into town with the anti-Taliban soldiers of Ghul Agha Sherzai, a former governor who had been run out by the Taliban for his excesses. Sherzai's boys were celebrating. They'd captured one of Mullah Omar's cars, a sinister black Lexus 4x4 and were parading it around the driveway of the governor's house. Inside one of the many rooms in the vaulted mansion, they were horsing around with a bunch of leather straps used by the Taliban's dreaded religious...
...Allies are on the trail. This morning, a convoy of U.S. commandos and British Special Forces in 4x4s sped off into the desert south of Kandahar airport. On the horizon appeared a mud-walled fortress. Inside was an Al Qaeda training camp, with firing ranges, an underground bunker and a main headquarters. It was an early target for Cruise missiles, but the commandos were scouring the bombed-out camouflaged buildings for any leads...
...While Sherzai doled out money, guns and ceremonial turbans to his new tribal allies in the city, the special forces were on terrorist patrol. When the Taliban fled Kandahar, scores of Arabs were left behind, and they hid where they could. Now, the Kandaharis are turning them in, and the Americans are coming to hunt down the last of bin Laden...