Word: quetta
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...Quetta: The Chilling Thoughts of an Eight-year...
...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...
...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...
...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...