Word: mullah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Taliban today in Afghanistan is a markedly different movement from that of those warriors whose one-eyed leader, Mullah Omar, riding on a motorcycle, escaped capture from American forces in Kandahar in December 2001. Mullah Omar is still their leader, even though, as a senior Afghan intelligence official told TIME, he is thought to be hiding across the border in Pakistan, moving between the towns of Quetta and Zob in the scorched Baluchistan desert. Nowadays, though, the Taliban encompasses a vast and disparate array of players. A look at who they are is key to understanding why they are gaining...
...Taliban is not monolithic. It is composed of several layers: a hard-core group of former Taliban commanders (including Mullah Omar) who operate out of sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan and who maintain ties with Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency (though Islamabad vehemently denies this); bands linked to al-Qaeda whose ranks have recently swelled with Arab, Chechen and Uzbek fighters operating in the craggy, northeastern ranges of Afghanistan; and, a last group, probably the largest, made up of local tribesmen who have allied themselves loosely with the Taliban as a result of President Hamid Karzai's often corrupt...
...experts say. Elders who belong to once neutral tribes in Kandahar province are now telling their youths to take up arms against the foreign invaders, as their fathers did back in the 1980s against the Red Army. In Tahkt-e-Pul, on the edges of Kandahar city, an influential mullah recently refused to preside over the funeral of a dead Afghan government soldier, a local boy; meanwhile a Taliban, who died fighting the Americans or the British, was honored as a brave martyr. It is a disturbing change among Afghans who in 2001, after the benighted years of the Taliban...
...still scarred from the 2005 bombings by British-born terrorists and the far-right British National Party winning seats in recent European parliamentary elections, the novel seems spookily prescient. Though its themes of radical faith and alienation endure, Kureishi's mosque visits didn't. One Friday, he recalls, the mullah at a mosque in London's East End warned that "there are spies and journalists in our midst," after which Kureishi was tossed out "by four blokes, who picked me up and heaved me out the door...
...Mullah Omar, the elusive one-eyed founder of the Taliban, has reiterated his call to disrupt the election. Responding to overtures from the government for an election cease-fire, Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi said via e-mail, "We don't feel it is important to have contact with the slavish and corrupt administration, and we don't need them to contact us." He pledged that the election "will be sabotaged in everywhere possible." On Aug. 16, three rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) were fired into Kandahar city, killing a young girl and injuring four children. The following evenings, small-arms...