Word: raids
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...That's one, tiny example of how every encounter, from simple visa checks to complicated special ops, is fraught with the potential for misunderstanding, confusions and, in military parlance, snafus. Take the raid on the village of Band Taimore, 80 kilometers west of Kandahar. On the night of May 24, helicopters raining machine-gun fire descended onto the village wheat fields. The mission was a success. U.S. forces killed Haji Bajet, 70, a supporter of Taliban leader Mullah Omar since 1994, who also had links with Akhter Mohammed Usmani, the probable heir to the still-fugitive Omar...
...wasn't a whistle-clean success?if such a thing is imaginable in Afghanistan?and in the raid's aftermath, anti-U.S. sentiment is rising around strategically important Kandahar...
...During the raid, 55 men were taken prisoner. A week later, all but five were released and allowed to return home. When the men were being rounded up, according to villagers, American soldiers bound and shoved the village women. That was an affront. Naibo, a middle-aged mother with cropped black hair, hands and feet scored from years of labor, says troops used plastic handcuffs to tie her hands and a torn turban to gag her. "I felt certain they were going to kill me," she says. "I was whispering the prayer before dying from the Koran." Other women made...
...have lodged complaints about the incident. "They are responsible for this loss of life and must answer for it," says a Kandahar police official of the American forces. A gathering of Muslim clerics across the border in Quetta, Pakistan, last week condemned the U.S. and called for retribution. The raid?a necessary one by U.S. calculations?has been added by Afghans to the other, larger accidents during the American campaign: the bombing of a wedding party in December in Paktia, the slaughter of 21 friendly Afghan troops in Uruzgan in January, and the killing of three Afghan soldiers near Gardez...
Perhaps most significant of all, Abu Zubaydah was captured in March after a gunfight in Faisalabad, Pakistan, at the end of a police raid. He had played key roles both in the camps and in running al-Qaeda operations, and his arrest, says Roland Jacquard, a leading French expert on Islamic terrorism, was "an enormous, stupendous blow to al-Qaeda." Abu Zubaydah seems to have specialized in organizing al-Qaeda operatives based in Europe and North America. Ahmed Ressam, the Montreal-based "millennium bomber" captured at the end of 1999 while attempting to cross from Canada into Washington State with...