Word: mujahedins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...partnership worked - to a point. Vang Pao's troops gained a reputation for being fierce jungle fighters who rescued downed U.S. aircrews, gathered military intelligence and fought the communists to a stalemate. The effort was for many years the CIA's largest covert operation, until the agency funded the mujahedin against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In 1969, Richard Helms, director of the CIA, told President Richard Nixon that Vang Pao had 39,000 troops engaged in active fighting. But casualties were so bad, he wrote, that Vang Pao's forces were using teenagers as young as 13 to fill their...
...Taliban leadership, needless to say, has greeted all this with a snort of derision. "The mujahedin of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan are not mercenaries," said Mullah Brader Akhund in a statement. "This war will come to an end when all invaders leave our country and an Islamic government based on the aspirations of our people is formed." Such a denunciation was to be expected. But even those who back the plan worry that Karzai's corruption-riddled government is so detested that money and jobs will not be enough, on their own, to woo fighters to switch sides. "Paying...
...Qaeda and its ilk. This is a conflict that was barely on the radar in the 1990s - which is exactly the problem. By most accounts, Osama bin Laden founded his organization sometime between 1988 and 1990. The U.S., in part, helped create this loathsome band itself by funding the mujahedin, who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and provided much of the training for bin Laden's foot soldiers. But our friendly freedom fighters turned into foes. In 1992 al-Qaeda bombed a hotel in Yemen, hoping to kill American Marines bound for Somalia. Then came the first...
...time coordinated with a grenade tossed at the Srinagar police chief's office nearby. September witnessed a further escalation. A Sept. 12 car bomb killed four policemen outside the Srinagar Central Jail; 10 days later, security forces say they killed two suspected terrorists, including a commander of Hizb-ul-Mujahedin, a group based in Pakistani Kashmir. On Sept. 28, CRPF killed three militants; a day later, three CRPF men were gunned down in a market in the town of Sopore...
...chose a site near the tribal village of Jaji. Using bulldozers and explosives, bin Laden connected some 500 mountain caves into a network of underground rooms. He called the place al-Masada, or the Lion's Den - and he was the lion. There, in the spring of 1987, the mujahedin repelled attacks by élite Soviet troops backed by bomber jets and pro-Soviet Afghan fighters. Victory in the Battle of Jaji, during which bin Laden may have been wounded, became the cradle of Osama's myth. A generation later, halfway around the world, we are still living with...