Word: pashtuns
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...deputy betrayed him in May 1997, turning the city over to the Taliban while Dostum fled to Turkey. The local Uzbeks and Hazaras rose in revolt. They took back the city, drove 2,000 of the mostly Pashtun Taliban into the desert in large container trucks and buried them in mass graves. Half died in the containers. Others were shot and thrown in wells, grenades tossed in behind them. Some were buried alive...
...hunt down the remnants of the al-Qaeda brass. Members of Britain's elite Special Air Service regiment are said to be assisting American commandos in the manhunt. The Pentagon may still establish forward bases in Afghanistan to stage special-ops search-and-destroy missions alongside the Pashtun in the south and to secure humanitarian supply lines in the north. But American military planners remained leery of sending ground troops into the caves to root out the enemy in person. They would prefer to dispatch their far more experienced Afghan proxies to the enemy lairs if entry becomes necessary. Caves...
...most convincing sign that the Taliban had come undone. The swiftness of the regime's retreat from the north led some allied commanders to warn that the Taliban was conserving its forces and artillery for a ferocious defense of their southern citadel. But it didn't come. As Pashtun opposition forces encircled the city, the Taliban mustered no more than sporadic skirmishing. That, and the week's long string of northern defeats, convinced anti-Taliban Pashtun that they could take down the core Taliban warriors in the south and persuade the rest to switch sides; the prospect of Tajik, Uzbek...
...Afghans listened. "Omar doesn't have the same power he had in the past," says Haqiq, the Pashtun commander. "They keep saying he will fight to the end, but we don't think that's true." Across Afghanistan, people deserted the regime as soon as it started losing, exposing its shallow hold on them. "The Taliban showed they were good at enforcing beard lengths," says a Western diplomat, "and that's about it." The first, pivotal defeat of the Taliban, in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, was greased by local Pashtun fed up with taking orders from "these...
...That's why the American targeting of Atef also served to deliver a pointed message to his boss. As American commandos did in northern Afghanistan, U.S. special ops in the south provided Pashtun tribes with advice, ammunition and weapons. But the immediate goal was to divine bin Laden's location with enough precision for the U.S. to deploy its forces--either technological or human, in the air or down into a cave--to deliver the final blow. All week American troops manned checkpoints on the roads running through former Taliban country, seeking clues to bin Laden's coordinates. Special...