Word: mazar
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Across the liberated provinces, Afghans have feared a return to pre-Taliban civil strife. Pashtun farmers have lived in the northern plains around Mazar-i-Sharif for a century, but now many have had enough. With 32 other families, a farmer named Saidu walked for 15 days through cannon fire and biting wind to reach a bleak refugee camp in the Pashtun desert of the south. "I've suffered too much," he said. "I'm not going back up north, not if [Northern Alliance leader Burhanuddin] Rabbani is ruler or Dostum. They'll kill us Pashtun." The country could...
Saidu has some reason to run from Mazar, where thousands have died each time the city changed hands. Last week Red Cross workers found nearly 600 bodies, killed in fighting or executed. The manner in which Mazar emerges from Taliban rule could signal how Afghanistan will fare at peace...
...Dostum, an Uzbek, held court at his Kalai Jangi fortress to the southeast, Tajik leader Atta Mohammed and Hazara chief Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq set themselves up in palatial villas in their own quarters of the city. In public all three insist their convenient alliance is holding as they empty Mazar of armed men and set up a joint security force...
...children and grandchildren huddled around him in a tiny, open tent of sticks and stitched sacks, the 65-year-old brushes away tears as he describes his prospects in the coming Afghan winter. Freezing rain and snow will cover the Dehdadi camp on the southern outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif, home to 15,000 refugees. Temperatures will drop to 5[degrees]F, and the filthy roadside ditch from which the refugees fetch their gray fetid water will freeze...
After three years of drought, five years of failed harvests and 22 years of war, the refugees have exhausted their meager savings and killed their livestock. In August the camps around Mazar-i-Sharif had a two-week supply of food. After Sept. 11 all aid was suspended as agencies withdrew; 230 have died in Dehdadi since then. Others have fled into the frozen mountains rather than live in a war zone. Without food or water, many have surely perished. Now, with the Taliban's retreat, the way to better-supplied camps near Pakistan is open--but many...