Word: mud
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...must get its eyes and ears down to ground level. It might start the search in the mud-brick city of Peshawar, Pakistan, hard by the Afghan border at the foot of the Khyber Pass. This is where the terrorists meet, form cells and deploy--and where access to the closed world of the Taliban begins. Bin Laden's foot soldiers regularly slip through the walled enclaves and jostling bazaars to recruit jihadis or send out instructions. Taliban fighters float through to spy and resupply. Every Afghan faction has its representative in some dim house. Intelligence agents linger...
Northern Alliance officials continue to paint a rosy picture of a regime on the verge of collapse. Over cups of tea in their calm command posts or in small mud houses near the dozy front, they assure visitors that Taliban morale is nosediving, that desertions are widespread. Checking such assertions can be bewildering. A group of journalists spent a day looking for the sole confirmed deserter on the Kabul front, and at first they were told he could not be reached because he was at the front line working the radios, calling on his former colleagues to surrender. Many hours...
...attend a four-day Navy commando training camp at a military base in southwest Korea. Kim easily dealt with hiking along an open sewage ditch, sprinting with a car tire strapped to her back, floating for half an hour in frigid ocean waters and rolling commando-style in mud. But when coaches blindfolded her in the dead of night, took her to a crematorium and told her to fetch bones from the ovens, she almost lost it. Says the tanned Olympian, hard-muscled from using bows with a bone-snapping 17 kg of draw weight: "I cried...
...southern Afghanistan, her Taliban neighbors all drive new Toyota Hi-Lux pickups and Land Cruisers, flashy symbols of their new power. But one night three weeks ago, Barasna heard the slamming of car doors and the crying of sleepy children. She peered out into the lane with its high mud walls and saw that every Taliban commander in the area was fleeing the city with his family. Barasna knew why. It was Sept. 11, and on the radio she and her doctor husband had heard about the suicide hijackers who crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon...
...learned that fighting around Bamiyan had stopped a month before and we would be the first foreign visitors since the Buddhas were destroyed. Ten hours north in the back of a truck brought us to a stop where a group of Taliban fighters escorted us to a stone-and-mud compound. In each corner stood a militiaman armed with a locally made AK-47 assault rifle and guarding piles of ammunition and missiles loosely stacked against a wall. We sat on the ground and tensely drank tea with our hosts. The mood lightened as more Taliban members arrived, hugging...