Word: mazar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...regional strongmen who will help root out al-Qaeda, and the people Karzai has sent out to build a coherent Afghan nation. Two weeks ago, both U.S. officials and Karzai's government were embarrassed by reports that Uzbek commander Rashid Dostum, who worked closely with U.S. special forces around Mazar-i-Sharif during the early part of the anti-Taliban war, might have suffocated Taliban POWs in shipping containers and buried their bodies in mass graves. Zadran is the Dostum of Afghanistan's southeast, an unsavory but necessary ally...
Dostum brought the Najibullah regime down when he mutinied in 1992 and joined forces with the northern mujahedin. He and his cohort seized Mazar and set up their Jombesh. The following years raised to national art forms both the alliance of convenience and the stab in the back, and Dostum outperformed the rest. He moved in and out of alliances with Ahmed Shah Massoud, then the Jamiat commander; with Massoud's arch-enemy, the Islamist radical Gulbuddin Hekmatyar; and finally with the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban, enemy of both. Meanwhile, differences of policy and personality at the top of the Jombesh...
Driven into exile by the Taliban, first in 1997 and again in 1998, Dostum returned to Afghanistan last spring to join Jamiat commander Ustad Atta Mohammed in leading anti-Taliban forces in the hills south of Mazar. But last year's wartime alliance has soured. Tensions between Dostum and his northern rival--who also now prefers to be seen in elegantly tailored business suits--have centered on control of Mazar. Capital of the north and key to the area's agricultural, oil and gas wealth, the city once dominated by Dostum has fallen increasingly under Jamiat's sway. Failure...
...MAZAR-I-SHARIF The country's most celebrated warlord, Uzbek ABDUL RASHID DOSTUM has long been a strongman in the north. Though he still commands some 7,000 troops, lately his influence has been eroded by the rising power of Tajik USTAD ATTA MOHAMMED, whose force of 5,000 controls much of Mazar. Sporadic clashes between the rival factions have been temporarily defused...
...perhaps most disturbing is the manner in which those who live in war zones often seem barely to notice the blood and destruction. I've rarely felt less comfortable than I did when turning up at the scene of a massacre of 300 Taliban in Mazar-i-Sharif last November, I was greeted warmly by the Afghan perpetrators, offered tea and, as the gagging stench of rotting bodies filled the air, asked with a combination of Afghan politeness and pride how I was enjoying my stay in the jewel of northern Afghanistan...