Word: northerners
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DOWN AND OUT AT THE FRONT "This is the sort of place where epidemics are hatched," writes Moscow bureau chief Paul Quinn-Judge in his diary of the past six weeks in Northern Alliance-held Afghanistan, and he's not kidding. The style is Hunter Thompson-with-dysentery as Quinn-Judge comments on the poor sanitation, the bribe-hungry border guards and the recalcitrant military commanders. Quinn-Judge kept a daily dairy of his experiences reporting from the front lines of the war, a place where patience was of the essence because waiting is the main job of war correspondents...
...rural northern Nigeria, there are no refrigerators. Most people don't even have electricity. So perishable food must be eaten immediately, or it will go to waste. Mohammed Bah Abba, a local teacher, has developed an ingenious solution: the Pot-in-Pot Preservation Cooling System. A small earthenware pot is placed inside a larger one, and the space between the two is filled with moist sand. The inner pot is filled with fruit, vegetables or soft drinks; a wet cloth covers the whole thing. As water in the sand evaporates through the surface of the outer pot, it carries heat...
Twice in the past four years, Northern Alliance commander Rashid Dostum has had to flee Mazar-i-Sharif, the city he once ruled. Once he had to bribe his own men to let him out of town before the Taliban arrived. But last Friday Dostum re-entered the city in triumph. It was Mazar's latest--but perhaps not its last--reversal of fortune...
...attack on Chagatai ridge begins at 3:20 p.m. local time on Saturday, when General Moammar Hassan of the Northern Alliance shouts into his radio, "Advance forwards. We are ready to start the war now." Twenty yards to the left of the command bunker where he stands, a T-55 tank opens up with its main gun, and the assault is on. Northern Alliance artillery shells and 82-mm mortars whiz overhead as a 50-cal. gun pops individual rounds at Taliban front lines, 1,000 yds. away across a small dip in the rolling brown hills...
This attack with several hundred troops is intended to punch a hole in a second Taliban front line in northern Afghanistan and begin a push on the city of Taloqan, 25 miles south of this ridge. The Alliance has some 5,000 troops along the 20-mile Taloqan front; estimates of Taliban strength range from 5,000 to 10,000, so the rebels are relying on U.S. bombing for advantage. The ultimate aim is to link up with troops who took Mazar-i-Sharif on Friday night and to advance on the Taliban stronghold of Kunduz, thus reclaiming the entire...