Word: mullah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...village outside Tirin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan province in south-central Afghanistan. Some wear turbans; some do not. A few have long beards; others a few days' growth or none at all. The differences are trivial, though, given what unifies them. This village is their home. And, says Mullah Muramza, a slight, young man gently cradling a small bird in his hands: "Everyone here was with the Taliban...
...think it's bumbling along in the right direction," says a Western diplomat in Kabul. "Probably, things will be all right." Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's two top leaders, remain unaccounted for, and U.S. intelligence sources suspect that both are still alive. So is Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban. Sources tell Time that Omar may be forging an alliance with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a particularly dangerous former mujahedin leader--and briefly Prime Minister of Afghanistan--who slipped back into the country around February. "Hekmatyar should be seen as quite as much a worry...
...Afghans to supply the combat troops. Perez and most of the other members of Task Force Rakkasan had flown in from the Soviet-era air base at Bagram, an hour away. Intelligence reports at the base, just outside Kabul, had hinted that Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar might even be holed up in the sullen, beautiful valley. Perez liked the sound of that...
...surrender its grip on Afghanistan's cities last winter, but it was never systematically disarmed. Its fighters simply scattered into the hills, returning to their villages and, in many cases, joining up with local warlords. Many of their leaders escaped capture, too, most notably the one-eyed peasant mystic Mullah Omar - who has eluded capture by the U.S. despite the widespread belief that he remains based in the mountains of his home province. And the shape of the post-Taliban order in Kabul may have paradoxically helped set the stage for a Taliban resurgence...
Anti-Saddam hard-liners have lately seized on the extremist Ansar al-Islam as the organizational nexus that ties al-Qaeda to Baghdad. The group has existed in various forms since the 1990s, when its leader, an Islamic cleric named Najmadin Fatah who goes by the nom de guerre Mullah Krekar, took inspiration from Afghan mujahedin to launch a rebellion against the two feuding secular factions that divvy up Iraqi Kurdistan. Krekar, who carries a Norwegian passport, is a veteran of the mujahedin known for his ruthlessness. "He is not normal," says a Kurdish intelligence official. "He enjoys killing people...