Word: mullah
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...hinterlands of southeastern Afghanistan. But this has not dissuaded Afghan President Hamid Karzai from beginning discreet talks with moderates in the Taliban ranks. The unprecedented talks, which began last week, seem to have the Bush Administration's blessing. Karzai's mediator to the Taliban is its former Foreign Minister Mullah Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, who was released last Monday after 20 months in custody at a U.S. military base near Kabul...
Muttawakil remains close to his former captors. His family says he stays at the U.S. base in Kandahar for his own protection. Taliban hard-liners, including former Afghan leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, consider Muttawakil a traitor for having surrendered to U.S. forces and have ordered his assassination. Still, his family tells TIME, Muttawakil has taken the risk of sounding out some of his former comrades in Kandahar...
...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
...Rawi had a perspective on the biological and chemical programs as well. Those too, he insists, were shut down in the early 1990s; the scientists transferred to conventional military projects or civilian work. Last November, al-Rawi says, he was asked by Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huweish, head of the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, to give a seminar--essentially career counseling--to MIC scientists "on ways to attract funding for and shape new research projects because there was no weapons work for them...
According to both the Taliban source and a retired Pakistani intelligence officer, the U.S. has lately been trying a different approach to pacifying the militants. These sources say CIA operatives in Kandahar delivered a letter requesting talks to former Taliban Interior Minister Mullah Abdul Razzaq, thought to be hiding in Afghanistan. A Taliban military council, according to this account, responded with three conditions: that the U.S. release Taliban prisoners in Guantanamo, that it stop referring to Taliban members as terrorists and that it announce that talks with the Taliban came at Washington's request. The ex-Taliban source says...