Word: quetta
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Quetta Miraculously, I get permission to travel to Chaman, the last Pakistani outpost before Afghanistan. The border is no more than a chain. Rafiq Ahmed, a mustached Pakistani youth in his mid-twenties, hovers uncertainly, unsure whether he wants to cross into Afghanistan. "My elder brother left home to join the Taliban," Rafiq says. "I must find him and bring him back home before he is killed." But Rafiq has fears about his quest. He's worried he'll be beaten by the Taliban for not having a beard, or dragooned into fighting for them. Swallowing hard, he finally crosses...
...border guard if he would arrest bin Laden if he tried to slip into Pakistan. "Of course," he laughed. "It would be a great service. That way, there would be no fighting between America and the Afghans." On the road back to Quetta, we pass a Koranic school where kids have constructed a row of toy antiaircraft guns to take shots at imaginary U.S. warplanes flying out of the desert sunset. I hope the border guard gets lucky: it might allow those schoolkids to grow up without training their sights on real U.S. fighter jets...
...featured close-ups of its gold crown and breastplate. The asking price: $10 million. The possession of antiquities older than 50 years is a crime in Pakistan, as is their forgery; Karachi's deputy superintendent of police, Muhammad Farooq Awan, arrested the video's distributor, who led police to Quetta, Baluchistan's rugged provincial capital. There, Awan and his team raided the home of Wali Muhammad Reeki, a powerful tribal chief who keeps two pet camels on his estate and has a taste for their milk. Reeki took the police to a relative's house. In a locked room, hidden...
...team of police officers dragged the 300-kg sarcophagus outside and wedged it into their Toyota Hiace van. When they opened it less than an hour later in the Quetta police station, they found the mummified body wrapped in brown cotton cloth and stretched out on a woven mat coated with a mixture of wax, resin and honey. The mummy's gold crown and breastplate were engraved with the cuneiform writing used in ancient Mesopotamia and an image of Ahura-Mazda, the god of Zoroastrianism associated with ancient Persia. Encased in a heavy wood coffin, it was placed in what...