Word: mahmad
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...Mahmad, an officer in the Afghan national police, was on his way to Sangin, in southwestern Afghanistan, last month when he found himself fighting for his life. He was traveling in a police convoy of five dilapidated pickup trucks armed with a modest arsenal of rocket launchers and AK-47s. As the patrol neared Sangin, Mahmad, 22, heard gunshots. He looked up to see that the man riding next to him was dead. Soon they were surrounded by Taliban guerrillas who had charged from the hilltops shouting "Allahu akbar." Five policemen were killed before commanders called in air support...
...base comedian, Khwaja, short, tousle-haired with a square face, mustache and three days of stubble, gets one of the Pakistani "terrorists" from across the line on the walkie-talkie. Opening greetings rapidly degenerate into an exchange of obscenities featuring enemy womenfolk and various farmyard animals. Allah Mahmad and the boys gathered around him listening are doubled over in laughter...
...stale bread dunked in thin soup and drink strong black tea. After finishing, two of the boys turn to karambol, a game like pool in which flat counters are flicked across a board. Farid, another section commander, sits intently loading an ammunition belt with machine-gun rounds. Allah Mahmad lounges on one of the beds and talks wistfully of wanting the kind of education for his four sons that he never got. "Right now the two eldest are being taught by mullahs," he says with a laugh. "It's not great...
...doesn't try to sleep before 2 a.m. Guards posted in the ruined cinema and at the gate are changed every two hours and Allah Mahmad makes his own rounds of the perimeter twice nightly. No one sleeps much: there are challenges shouted into the darkness, bursts of fire, the coming and going of guards. At 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. unseen American planes blitz the area near the pass with what look like cluster bombs...
...When it does Allah Mahmad expects to advance quickly on Kabul. "Just days," he says. His men will be reinforced by the thousands of troops that have been massing in the Panjshir Valley and the northern end of the Shomali Plain. But the Taliban and its Arab and Pakistani allies have also been reinforcing their front lines, digging new bunkers within sight of the 40th Division base. How many of Allah Mahmad's men die in the impending offensive hinges on whether, in the coming days, American bombing increases its intensity and moves closer to the lines...