Word: northern
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...odds with one another. For it is in Kurdistan that Iraq may actually fissure. The central and regional Kurdish governments have been arguing over oil, land and money for years. Recently, they would have clashed if U.S. forces had not intervened. (Read about the political turmoil in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq...
While Karzai has welcomed home the Uzbek strongman, the U.S. and human rights groups have protested his sudden return as a setback for Afghan democracy. As a commander of the Uzbek forces of the Northern Alliance, Dostum acquired a reputation for brutality and was accused of war crimes, including the mass suffocation of Taliban prisoners held in metal containers in 2001. He denies the allegations. Dostum had taken refuge in Turkey amid conflict with a rival, but he remains the single most powerful leader of an Uzbek minority that accounts for 9% of Afghanistan's population. (Read a story about...
...league with the Taliban and other enemies of Afghanistan. "I've received 20,000 people at my home over the past two days. Why did they come to meet me?", he asks rhetorically. "Because they are afraid the Taliban are approaching. By having General Dostum in the northern provinces, the people will again feel like they are in the belly of their mothers...
...Pashtuns of the south, who make up 40% of the population, they could undercut the legitimacy of the election. It would spell trouble for President Hamid Karzai, who is still the favorite, though he is trying to avoid a troublesome runoff with Abdullah Abdullah, the former Foreign Minister and Northern Alliance candidate whose campaign has gained momentum of late. If southern voters stay home in large enough numbers, say analysts, there is a slight but not impossible scenario that northern voters could dictate the election's outcome in favor of Abdullah, further destabilizing the region. (Although half-Pashtun, Abdullah...
...voice coming through the public-address system was familiar yet strange. I had not heard it in at least 27 years, not since I had traveled to the sacred Madhu Shrine in northern Sri Lanka in August 1982 when I was a child and on pilgrimage with my family: "Aandavane" ("Oh, Holy Lord" in Tamil), "Aandavane." The words spread through the church compound where half a million others had made the same journey to see Madhu Matha, the Mother of Madhu, in her sacred precincts...