Word: kandahar
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...Qaeda stalwarts in the city, who had vowed to die fighting--even to kill Taliban who tried to give up. A deal was cut: if Fazil could ensure that the entire force surrendered, Dostum would give all of them--including the foreign contingent--safe passage across the country to Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold far to the south. Dostum didn't care what happened to them once they left his area...
...Taliban restored order to Afghan cities, but it was order of a sinister kind. Most of the leadership and the fighters were Pashtun tribesmen from rural areas of the south around Kandahar. In some respects, the harshness of their treatment of women was their attempt to extend across all Afghanistan the primitive social order of their villages at home. And it allowed the leadership to claim that Taliban rule had conferred on its male warriors a new degree of authority. The nation was a shambles, but at least the women were firmly under control...
...Afghanistan is famously resistant to outside interference. Ask the Russians. "When the Soviets came, they wanted to change the country overnight, abandoning tribal codes that existed for centuries," says Nelofer Pazira, an exiled Afghan journalist and dedicated foe of the Taliban who stars in the film Kandahar (see box). "People were appalled. They went completely in the opposite direction. Even more liberal families became very conservative...
...Afghan-reared Canadian journalist named Nelofer Pazira attempted to slip across the Iranian border into her native land. She was trying to reach the city of Kandahar before an old school friend, depressed by the rigors of Taliban repression, made good on a suicide threat...
This much of Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf's lovely and terrifying movie Kandahar is true. Indeed, Pazira, 28, plays Nafas, the character she inspired--though in the film it is a sister, not a friend, she seeks to save--and the year is 1999, just before the millennium new year. In real life, Pazira only briefly penetrated Afghanistan's border. In the film, her character, shrouded in a burka and taking notes on a hidden tape recorder, is a brave, lonely figure constantly menaced by a bleak land and the day-to-day anarchy of the life she finds there...