Word: mudding
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...were looking to disappear, the Afghan province of Helmand would be the place to do it. Hundreds of miles of desert, hills and mountains are interrupted only by the occasional huddle of mud-brick houses. The remote village of Musa Qal'eh in Helmand is still Taliban country. When Kandahar fell last month, as many as 1,500 Taliban fighters and their leaders are thought to have passed through the village. One of them may have been Mullah Mohammed Omar, the former ruler of Afghanistan and America's second-most-wanted...
...either side continually take potshots at each other. These days the situation is nothing less than explosive. On Dec. 23, Pakistan lobbed an 81-mm mortar into Chand's courtyard, the first time such heavy ordnance has been used in the area since 1971. The mortar landed in mud and failed to detonate. Now army engineers are trying to extricate it, whacking around the shell with heavy pickaxes. "If that thing had burst," says Chand, observing from a few feet away, "nothing would have survived...
...work last Thursday in the office of his headquarters, a huddle of mud huts in the southern Afghan desert, in Shahwalikot, Hamid Karzai had no reason to be concerned by the rumble of a B-52 bomber overhead. The Americans were his strong supporters. Just outside his window there were U.S. commandos working with anti-Taliban Pashtun fighters. Besides, he had plenty of other things on his mind. The night before, the soft-spoken Pashtun tribal leader had received word that he had been chosen as Afghanistan's interim Prime Minister by the U.N.-sponsored gathering of Afghan factions...
Even when the B-52 started circling overhead in a slow, white-tailed arc, Karzai was unperturbed. All morning U.S. bombers and fighter planes had been hammering Taliban positions several miles away at the Kandahar airport. Then suddenly Karzai's world blew apart. The mud walls of his office shook as if they were turning to dust, and the windows blasted in, cutting his face with flying glass. Just a few hundred yards away, a stray 2,000-lb. bomb from the American plane had slammed down. The same bomb killed three American servicemen, as well as seven Afghans, including...
...Allies are on the trail. This morning, a convoy of U.S. commandos and British Special Forces in 4x4s sped off into the desert south of Kandahar airport. On the horizon appeared a mud-walled fortress. Inside was an Al Qaeda training camp, with firing ranges, an underground bunker and a main headquarters. It was an early target for Cruise missiles, but the commandos were scouring the bombed-out camouflaged buildings for any leads...