Word: kashmir
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...relief obstructions," says Thomas Miller, chief executive of Plan International, an aid agency helping children. "You have landslides, snow and no roads to reach the people way up in the mountains." Further complicating relief efforts is the danger that militant Islamic groups operating from camps in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir could resume their long-simmering war for control of the region, where an uneasy cease-fire has held since...
...Because winter snows and heavy rains make many of Kashmir's roads impassable, the U.N.'s World Food Program (WFP) reckons that helicopters are the only means of bringing food to 400,000 quake victims stranded in remote mountain villages. While nearly a dozen governments, led by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia along with the World Bank and other financial institutions, have pledged more than $5.4 billion in funding for the long-term reconstruction of Pakistan, aid organizations say they aren't getting the backup they need. Private aid agencies complain that donors are tired of digging into their pockets...
...they do, it will be thanks not only to divine intervention but to an extraordinarily wide-ranging effort on the ground. Scattered in some 75 camps throughout Kashmir is an eclectic mix of professional aid workers, foreign volunteers, Islamic extremists and soldiers (Pakistan alone has committed about 40,000 troops to relief efforts). In some cases, old adversaries have set aside their enormous differences, at least for now. Before the quake, the mountain valleys of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir were off-limits to outsiders. Called Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir) by the Pakistanis, the area was cordoned off by the army because...
...Meanwhile, shadowy Islamic groups ran clandestine camps that trained jihadi volunteers in guerrilla warfare and slipped them across the Line of Control?the unofficial border between the Pakistani and Indian areas of Kashmir?to ambush troops, Hindu civilians and politicians on the Indian side. President Pervez Musharraf, under pressure from the U.S. after 9/11, says he closed the camps in Azad Kashmir. But as recently as last August, according to sources in the militant groups, bands of guerrillas were still crossing over the Line of Control, dodging Indian land mines and patrols...
...quake has changed everything. The necessity of coping with the devastation in Azad Kashmir has strengthened the precarious cease-fire and forced the Pakistanis to open up. On the mountainsides where thousands of refugee tents have sprouted between collapsed buildings, the U.S. military is delivering drinking water to camps run by "Axis of Evil" nemesis Iran; U.S. and NATO soldiers flirt with Cuban nurses. But the most surreal partnership of all is between the U.S. military and Islamic militants from groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba, branded by Washington as terrorists. Bemused to find himself at daily briefings in Muzaffarabad with...