Word: mullah
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...week and a half in April 2005, one of the favorite warlords of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was sitting in a room at the Embassy Suites Hotel in lower Manhattan, not far from where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood. But Haji Bashar Noorzai, the burly, bearded leader of one of Afghanistan's largest and most troublesome tribes, was not on a mission to case New York City for a terrorist attack. On the contrary, Noorzai, a confidant of the fugitive Taliban overlord, who is a well-known ally of Osama bin Laden...
...several days he hunkered down in that hotel room and was bombarded with questions by U.S. government agents. What was going on in the war in Afghanistan? Where was Mullah Omar? Where was bin Laden? What was the state of opium and heroin production in the tribal lands Noorzai commanded--the very region of Afghanistan where support for the Taliban remains strongest? Noorzai believed he had answered everything to the agents' satisfaction, that he had convinced them that he could help counter the Taliban's resurgent influence in his home province and that he could be an asset...
...small number of mostly special-forces soldiers; the strategy all but ensured that the U.S. would have to outsource the messy and labor-intensive duties of maintaining order in a power vacuum. This meant using, and paying, the existing warlords to do the U.S.'s dirty work against Mullah Omar's Taliban and bin Laden's al-Qaeda...
When the Taliban came to power in 1996, according to the DEA, Noorzai reached the peak of his influence. While Taliban leader Mullah Omar's tribal background is not known, he was always reliably supported by the Noorzai tribe. Even when the ruling Taliban was cracking down on the opium trade, Noorzai's closeness to the regime allowed Noorzai to become one of just four big traffickers permitted to grow and process poppies, according to Jamil Karzai, a current member of the Afghan parliament and a second cousin of President Hamid Karzai's. In 1997, the DEA says, Noorzai...
...homes in the Pakistani border city of Quetta, a two-story fortresslike structure. He left quickly for Afghanistan to prepare for the coming trouble and then returned to Pakistan just before the U.S. assault began. He was not wrong to sense personal risk: his closeness to Mullah Omar led to Noorzai's designation as a "high-value military target...