Word: mujahedin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Qaeda had its origins in the long war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After Soviet troops invaded the country in 1979, Muslims flocked to join the local mujahedin in fighting them. In Peshawar, Pakistan, which acted as the effective headquarters of the resistance, a group whose spiritual leader was a Palestinian academic called Abdallah Azzam established a service organization to provide logistics and religious instruction to the fighters. The operation came to be known as al-Qaeda al-Sulbah-the "solid base." Much of its financing came from bin Laden, an acolyte of Azzam...
...telling that to the 3,000 or so anti-Taliban mujahedin who a few weeks ago flocked to Jabal-us-Saraj, just north of Kabul, and crowded its streets as they prepared to march on the capital. Last week the crowds had vanished, and alliance commanders complained bitterly about the U.S.'s failure to strafe Taliban front lines defending Kabul and allow the rebels to make a move on the city. Horan Amin, the alliance's representative in Washington, says that "from certain quarters in the State Department, we have been told that they would not be happy...
...1900s, when King Mohammed Zahir Shah ruled Afghanistan, wealthy women strolled Kabul's streets in jeans and Western dresses. The Soviets, although brutal in their occupation of the country, maintained women's rights during their decade-long rule. But when the Islam-inspired mujahedin government took over in 1992, life began to change. Women still could attend university, especially to study in the medical and educational fields, but many started wearing head scarves to appease the mullahs. When the Taliban came to power in 1996, its fanatical clerics erased all remaining rights: women are forbidden to leave the house without...
...future of women depends on who ends up running the country. The Northern Alliance, the loose coalition of former mujahedin fighting the Taliban, could play a major role. Abdullah Abdullah, the Alliance's smooth-talking Foreign Minister, vowed last week that women would be part of any government he helped form. But in the Alliance's garrison town of Khoja Bahauddin women walk soundlessly in full burka. "The majority of Afghan men do not believe women should have rights," says Farahnaz Nazir, head of the Afghanistan Women's Association, the only women's organization operating openly in the country today...
...water?and adults engage in the latest pastime: tracking high-flying jets through binoculars. Market prices are unchanged, largely because so many people have fled. But residents are frightened and angry, and much of their scorn is reserved for the Taliban and for its Arab allies in Afghanistan, former mujahedin who have come to fight a jihad. "We have become hostages of the Arabs," says Nek Mohammad, a driver. Several of the Kandaharis I spoke to claim there are thousands of Arabs in the country. I was told that a number of Arabs traveled to Kabul this past week...