Word: khost
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...brutal war against the Soviets and the turmoil afterward, he remained aloof from their suffering, silent in his gilded exile. But already a groundswell for his return is growing among the Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan along the frontier. Reports are sketchy, but in the southern Afghan provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika influential tribal elders are so worried about rising support for the King among their clansmen that they are threatening to burn down the houses of anyone caught switching sides...
Omar is also responding to this revolt with stealth. He dispatched secret police with instructions to arrest any outsiders or chieftains flashing sudden wealth, according to a source in eastern Afghanistan. Jalaluddin Haqqani, a popular Taliban commander-in-chief in Khost, held a rally warning the local tribesmen not to join the King. His forces wore shrouds, indicating they were prepared to die fighting the monarch's supporters...
...kept surfacing in connection with various plots by Islamic terrorist Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, now serving a life sentence for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York City. Both Yousef and Abu Sayyaf founder Janjalani may have received training in the early 1990s at a commando camp near Khost, in Afghanistan. It was run by a professor of Islam Abdur Rab Rasul Sayyaf, whose belief in the strict Wahabi interpretation of Islam found him favor with many wealthy Saudis, including Osama bin Laden, No. 1 on America's list of most dangerous terrorists...
...Khost, Janjalani made up for his diminutive size with ferocity and his oratory, honed at Islamic universities in Libya and Syria. He reverentially appropriated Sayyaf's name (which means "swordsman" in Arabic) for his group back home. In 1991, Abu Sayyaf struck its first blow by killing two American evangelists in a grenade blast in Zamboanga. This was followed by a string of kidnappings, massacres and extortion operations. Cassette tapes of Janjalani's jihad sermons began circulating, and other gangs of Moro brigands in the Sulu islands?who specialized in running drugs and guns, kidnapping and growing marijuana?accepted Janjalani...
...says, it is time for the U.S. to cough up some funds. "If they don't our soldiers will disappear and al-Qaeda will come back," he warns. But Pachakhan certainly will not give up that easily. In Khost, counter-terror operations are an extension of local politics. Pachakhan is hunting down al-Qaeda in his region to "protect our family and friends," says his brother-minister, Amanullah. A top al-Qaeda leader in the area, the brothers claim, is old rival Jamaludin Haqqani, a former mujahedin in Soviet times and later a Taliban minister, who squeezed the royalists...