Word: khans
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Mohammad Sarfarz Khan strides up a short mud path to a tunnel dug into the hillside, enters and disappears. The 61-year-old Kashmiri villager is sure-footed in the gloom, feeling his way around the shelter with practiced confidence. When he reaches the inner bunker, Khan pulls a blanket around his shoulders and peers out of a small window. It is from here that, since 1989, he has watched thousands of Indian and Pakistani artillery shells describe golden arcs as they split the air of the valley below. "I suppose we were lucky," he says, of surviving 14 years...
...Like thousands of Kashmiris, Khan found himself living on the front line of what would become Asia's most bitter conflict when the U.N. drew a Line of Control through Kashmir in 1949, dividing the disputed Himalayan region into Indian and Pakistani parts. Because the Line of Control also split the area around Khan's village of Uroosa, he was cut off from all but his most immediate family. The divide deepened in 1989, when separatist rebels, incensed at India's heavy-handed rule of its only Muslim-majority state, began an uprising in the meadows of the Kashmir valley...
...part, Khan hasn't seen or spoken to his Pakistani relatives since he was eight. But a cease-fire announced in November, and an agreement last week by India and Pakistan to begin peace talks in February, have set him dreaming of a reunion. "It will be a new beginning," says Khan. "My family will meet once more, and life will start in our valley again." In his isolation, cut off in a war zone that until last month the Indian army kept off-limits to all but a few farmers, Khan cannot know that his relatives, whom TIME...
...blown off by the blast; from that grisly evidence he was identified as Muhammad Jamil, a 23-year-old from the Pakistani-controlled section of Kashmir, who was affiliated with a militant Islamic group that Musharraf has tried to curb. "Whoever has done this," says Major General Shaukat Sultan Khan, a spokesman for the military, "they have some kind of objective. They will keep trying until they reach...
Among the number of Afghan casualties inflicted by the U.S., the mistaken killing of 15 children stands out. "We are very angry," says Ghulab Khan, a local farmer observing the row of eight rocky graves in Paktia. The incidents are bound to inflame anger at American soldiers and the pro-U.S. President, Hamid Karzai. The deaths embarrassed U.S. military commanders struggling to bring security and normality to the country, and deepened worries among Afghan authorities and civilians about the accuracy and skill of U.S. counterinsurgency methods. "It shows the need for better coordination," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Omar Samad...