Word: peshawar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...other supporters--dousing U.S. and Pakistani hopes of an uprising among the country's Pashtun tribesmen. Haq's execution, says a foreign diplomat in Islamabad, "will make any tribal chieftain hesitate before turning against the Taliban." Ahmadullah couldn't hide his glee. In a satellite-telephone interview with a Peshawar journalist, he exulted, "Anyone who tries to enter Afghanistan will meet the same fate as Abdul...
...Qaeda had its origins in the long war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After Soviet troops invaded the country in 1979, Muslims flocked to join the local mujahedin in fighting them. In Peshawar, Pakistan, which acted as the effective headquarters of the resistance, a group whose spiritual leader was a Palestinian academic called Abdallah Azzam established a service organization to provide logistics and religious instruction to the fighters. The operation came to be known as al-Qaeda al-Sulbah?the "solid base." Much of its financing came from bin Laden, an acolyte of Azzam...
...while on his way with his two sons to Friday prayers in Peshawar, Azzam was killed by a massive explosion. His killers have never been identified; Azzam had many enemies. But by the time of his death, the group around al-Qaeda were debating what to do with the skills and resources that they had acquired. The decision was taken to keep the organization intact and use it to fight for a purer form of Islam. The initial target was not the U.S. but the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which al-Qaeda claimed were corrupt and too beholden...
...that U.S air strikes, carried out by one or two aircraft at a time, were not sufficient to dislodge the Taliban from their entrenched mountain positions. As the opposition pounded Taliban lines north of Kabul, more than 1,000 tribal elders, former mujahedin and other Afghan exiles assembled in Peshawar, Pakistan to discuss the post-Taliban era. The assembly agreed to invite the exiled king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, to play a moderating role and call a loya jirga, a grand council, to shape the country?s future government. But in a sign of the difficulty of building consensus, the king...
...rugged Afghan steppes and summits better than Haq, a legendary mujahedin guerrilla who lost his right foot to a land mine while helping rout the Soviets. He left Afghanistan during the post-Soviet power struggle and renounced politics after his wife and son were murdered in his Peshawar, Pakistan, home. But he recently returned to the Afghan frontier, hoping to enlist defectors and warlords in an anti-Taliban southern alliance. Because he was Pashtun--the dominant tribe of southern Afghanistan and the Taliban itself--Haq was a precious asset to the U.S., which desperately wants an erosion of Taliban authority...