Word: mud
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wedding party on a late December night. But from the air, it looked to the pilots like what their intelligence source had claimed: a gathering of al-Qaeda terrorists. Dozens of cars had converged on Qila-Niazi, a hamlet of 12 mud-walled homes in the shadow of a snowy ridge 80 miles southeast of Kabul. The women were gossiping and painting their hands red with henna. The men were in another room playing cards and dancing. Music drowned out the sounds of the U.S. warplanes overhead...
...When big money intersects with horse racing, however, even the most polished institution can get a little mud on its linen. The arrival of the Year of the Horse finds the Jockey Club bogged down in its worst gambling scandal in memory. Last month, two of the club's top jockeys, South African Robbie Fradd and Irishman John Egan, were called in for questioning in a race-fixing investigation conducted by Hong Kong's Independent Commission Against Corruption. According to the ICAC, a four-month probe called Operation Green turned up evidence that racing professionals were providing inside information...
...forces when an American attack became imminent. But local feuds got in the way; Mansoor led his troops into the mountains, where they had already made preparations. Wardak says that in the tiny villages that cling to the slopes, al-Qaeda fighters had been buying the houses with mud walls, like miniature medieval fortresses. "Those who didn't want to sell," Wardak told TIME, "were asked to leave." Some al-Qaeda fighters hunkered down; high above the valley floor, others headed for the caves that Mansoor's father had dug 20 years...
...muddy, rutted road. Sabur was in the back of a brightly colored pickup; two Americans sat in the cabin, and another team of special forces followed them. As the truck splashed around a muddy bend, Sabur told TIME, "al-Qaeda opened fire on us with something big." In a mud-brick hut was hidden an antiaircraft gun or mortar. Munitions ripped through the cabin. Sabur took shrapnel in his leg. The convoy returned fire and called in air support. Three helicopters thundered up the canyon, blasting away at enemy positions. A few days later, another Afghan from the convoy showed...
...That column had been moving south at around 2am in the first days of Operation Anaconda, when a brightly colored truck carrying Afghan soldiers was hit by al Qaeda's heavy weapons. It now lies on its side in a ditch, not far from the mud-brick structure to the east where the trap had been laid. Calling in close air support, the coalition troops had pummeled the building and pushed the enemy back. But the al Qaeda fighters regrouped at a high walled compound further down the road and off to the west. Again they unleashed heavy weapons fire...