Word: pashtun
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...since the movement drove Afghanistan's government out of Kabul two weeks ago, and Dostum says he fears he will be next. The men lead a minority population in the north that fears persecution from the Taliban, who are generally Sunni Muslims and members of the nation's ethnic Pashtun majority. The new alliance raises the spectre of a large-scale civil war in a nation that has weathered Soviet occupation, protracted civil war and political infighting over the last two decades. Mark Coatney
...discontented. New violence already has broken out in Tibet, according to reports reaching London. In Europe there are feelings of repression and aspirations toward autonomy, if not independence, among Hungarians in Romania, Turks in Bulgaria and Poles in Lithuania, among others. In Afghanistan civil war could yet pit southern Pashtun against northern Uzbek and Tajik in a conflict that could spill over into neighboring Pakistan and the formerly Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan...
Massoud, a member of Afghanistan's Tajik minority, had initially held his men out of the capital, partly to avoid chaos in the city of 1.5 million and , partly to try to seal it off from Hekmatyar, his principal rival. Hekmatyar, an ethnic Pashtun and Islamic fundamentalist, had demanded that the rump government in Kabul surrender to him so that a strictly religious Muslim regime could be installed. Now both mujahedin forces are in the center of the city, including the grounds of the presidential palace, where even a small clash could spark another round of civil...