Word: mazar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Diplomats in Kabul say Karzai can enforce his announced purge only if the U.S. backs him. After all, two men on Karzai's list of wrongdoers--the intelligence chiefs of Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif--are tough characters whom the U.S. has used as proxies in the war against al-Qaeda. U.S. policy had been to avoid involvement in what it calls "green on green" fighting in Afghanistan: conflicts between militias at least theoretically loyal to the new government. But lately U.N. officials in Afghanistan say they have witnessed a sea change in the American attitude. The new stance...
...summer of 2001, Khan, 28, was pining for his young Afghan bride, who had gone to Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan to show off the couple's new baby to relatives. So Khan set off after them, traveling for a week by hitching rides on buses and trucks that were headed over icy mountain ranges. But soon after he arrived, the war swept him away. After the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance captured Mazar-e-Sharif from the Taliban, his parents heard nothing from him. "We were sure he'd been killed," says Azeem. Khan was a Pashtun...
...summer of 2001, Khan, 28, was pining for his young Afghan bride, who had gone to Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan to show off the couple's new baby to relatives. So Khan set off after them, traveling for a week by hitching rides on buses and trucks that were headed over icy, 4,800-m mountain ranges. But soon after he arrived, the war swept him away. After the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance captured Mazar-i-Sharif from the Taliban, his parents stopped hearing from him. "We were sure he'd been killed," says Azeem. Khan...
...Central Asia or Pakistan to the West, where Afghan hash finds many eager buyers. But as dope smokers celebrate the new "enlightened" view of pot, any thought of the distant, parched land where it is grown has been lost in the haze. Back in the dust-bowl fields around Mazar, the growing foreign demand and new freedom to exploit it translate into a rare chance at riches. While prices are minimal compared with the eventual $3,000 to $8,000 a kilo that Afghan hash fetches in the West, Northern Alliance commander Akbar Khan says farming anything except cannabis makes...
...Perhaps the starkest illustration of what cannabis is doing to Afghanistan is to be found at the village of Deh Naw, half an hour to the north of Mazar along Afghanistan's main north-south highway. Just out of sight of the hash hills upstream, the desert is swallowing Deh Naw whole. Five-meter-high sand dunes have crashed over the village's mud walls like desiccated tidal waves, burying houses, blocking streets and suffocating the vines and the mulberry, fig and pomegranate trees that once blossomed here. The 600 villagers survive by gathering desert thornbushes?used for lighting fires...