Word: mullah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...started out like so many others for U.S. counterinsurgency forces in Afghanistan: monitoring the airwaves for enemy communications. From the southeastern part of the country, the U.S. picked up a signal from the phone of a small-time Taliban commander, Mullah Wazir, whose band was suspected of ambushing road crews in an effort to halt reconstruction of the pitted Kabul-to-Kandahar highway. When Wazir's phone flickered to life, the U.S. traced it to a mud-walled fortress near the town of Ghazni. The U.S. command at Bagram air base outside Kabul quickly dispatched an A-10 Warthog fighter...
...Just hours earlier, U.S. forces made a similar blunder, killing six other children along with two adults, members of a village family in neighboring Paktia province. That raid was supposed to take out a powerful clergyman named Mullah Jalani, who was accused by the Pentagon of operating training camps for mujahedin, hiding a sizable arsenal inside his stockade and firing at U.S. troops with what officials call a "crew-served machine gun." But many question why Jalani had been targeted. Just two days before, he had been drinking tea and cracking jokes with the pro-U.S. governor...
...children and promise full investigations of the circumstances. But that doesn't address the larger problem of how to gather intelligence accurate enough to target wanted terrorists and minimize innocent deaths. A senior U.S. intelligence official concedes that the problem is unsolved: Hekmatyar, bin Laden and former Taliban leader Mullah Omar are all still at large. "The results speak for themselves," the official says. And the job may only get harder. In his videotape, Hekmatyar warns his followers not to use sat phones, seeking to deny the Americans even their advantage from overhead...
...threat: the export of suicide bombers from Europe, mainly to Iraq. Groups like Ansar al-Islam have reportedly stepped up recruitment on the Continent. "There has been a call from Ansar for kamikazes from Europe," says an Italian investigator. Authorities say they intercepted a satellite-phone conversation in which Mullah Fouad, a 32-year-old Iraqi, speaking from Syria, told a Hamburg operative: "I need Japanese guys here," presum- ably a reference to kamikaze-style bombers. The Italians issued an arrest warrant for the man they believe to be that operative, an Algerian called Abderrazak Mahdjoub, who was arrested...
...onboard, Karzai hopes he can garner support among the Pashtun and split the Taliban's ranks. But the President's program could falter at the start: Karzai's advisers say Muttawakil has already declined a Cabinet post, and is considering asylum in an Arab country--possibly Qatar--far from Mullah Omar's long memory and vengeful grasp. --By Tim McGirk and Rahimullah Yusufzai