Word: peshawar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...must get its eyes and ears down to ground level. It might start the search in the mud-brick city of Peshawar, Pakistan, hard by the Afghan border at the foot of the Khyber Pass. This is where the terrorists meet, form cells and deploy--and where access to the closed world of the Taliban begins. Bin Laden's foot soldiers regularly slip through the walled enclaves and jostling bazaars to recruit jihadis or send out instructions. Taliban fighters float through to spy and resupply. Every Afghan faction has its representative in some dim house. Intelligence agents linger...
This is a rift that Pakistani and U.S. intelligence officials are eager to widen. In the border cities of Quetta and Peshawar, Pakistani military intelligence agents are dusting off Afghan war veterans and putting them to work sending out feelers to fellow ex-commanders who are serving the Taliban. Those commanders are being urged to defect in exchange for bribes and the guarantee of a job in the next Afghan government. First indications are promising, according to anti-Taliban sources in both cities. When he asked about arms, one commander from Afghanistan's Nangarhar province was assured that anti-Taliban...
...comes to it, some Pashtuns are itching for a fight. In the tribal belt just south of Peshawar, Pashtun elders announced they had recruited 12,000 volunteers to fight a holy war if the U.S. sends in ground troops. One commander from an eastern Afghan province was recently in Peshawar exploring the monetary incentives on offer for a mutiny against his Taliban ruler in Kandahar. He was approached by one of his fighters: "Is it true American soldiers wear boots that cost 5,000 rupees [about $80] each? I could sell them in the bazaar." In the same province, recounted...
Farras Khan Shinwari starts work early, before the sun has risen over the red plains of Karkhla, 15 km east of Peshawar in northwest Pakistan. After a meager breakfast of tea and dry nan with his brothers, he starts sprinkling water on the mound of red clay they will mix and form into bricks. All around him on the plain, hundreds of illegal Afghan migrants squat barefoot in the clay, forming bricks with their hands for less than a dollar a day. Even the pittance they get here is more than they could make at home in Afghanistan. Farras will...
...thousand. The workers kneel down and pray in the field. Tomorrow they will start the same routine over again?mixing clay, molding bricks and drying, stacking and loading them onto packhorses to carry to the kiln. The product of their labor goes mostly to build merchants' houses in Peshawar or Hayatabad. The Shinwari family can only dream of the day when bricks made by their hands can be used to rebuild their own shattered country...