Word: quetta
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Quetta: The Chilling Thoughts of an Eight-year...
...after the first U.S. air raid on Afghanistan, and I'm stranded at the airport because of riots. A lot of these people in Quetta belong to the same Pushtun tribe as the Taliban, and they're not pleased with America. Even on the flight in from Islamabad, people were glaring at me in open hostility - and that's never happened to me before in Pakistan. I avoided four scowling Taliban clerics, bearded and black turbaned, who were a few rows ahead of me on the flight. The Taliban think the Pakistanis are wimps and bad Muslims for giving...
...While the Taliban mullahs and their bodyguards sped away towards the Afghan border, the rest of us passengers stared numbly at the distant city of Quetta, under a haze of tear gas as black smoke poured from a few buildings. Later, I learned that the anti-American mob had torched several movie theaters, which have been showing "Desperado" and "Gladiator." They also burned down the U.N. offices because-well, who knows why. Maybe they didn't like the big blue lettering on the U.N. sign. Behind us, a few Pakistani MiG fighter jets were screaming back and forth across...
...find a taxi driver for the ride into Quetta, one I could trust to get me through the rioters. I settled on an old man who had possibly the worst cab in the parking lot. But he was a "Haji" - a Muslim who'd made the pilgrimage to Mecca - and he radiated a certain serenity. Besides, I thought the zealots in the mob would be impressed by his venerable white beard. Before he took my bags, he quizzed me: "Who is the Superpower? Allah, or America?" Allah, of course. "Get in," he says. "I'll get you into Quetta safely...
...Already, officials from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are scouting out locations within the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan. Pakistan's government estimates a need for about 100 new camps, each able to shelter 10,000 people. "Water is scarce," says UNHCR's spokesman Rupert Colville in Quetta, "There has been a drought for three years." Relief officials say as many as 10,000 Afghans may have already slipped into Pakistan in recent days and are being sheltered by fellow clansmen, invisible inside the fortress-like tribal homes of the harsh borderlands...