Word: retreater
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...Agha, a local leader from a suburb near Kabul International Airport, he was on the roof of his house and heard Taliban soldiers saying Qarabagh had fallen. Soon after, he reported, they fled the city, joining some 8,000 Taliban and radical fighters. It was unclear whether the retreat had been ordered or was a result of panic. Said Jawed Hussein, 21, a Pakistani captured by the Alliance: "Everybody was running to save his own skin." Or driving. Abandoning tanks and heavy weapons, they stole an estimated 800 cars for their getaway. Destinations varied: some headed toward Maidanshahr, Ghazni...
...village, emptied of its population of farmers, had become an eerie no-man's-land. In the last half-mile up to Bangi, the sides of the road were heavily mined, a red rock every two or three yards marking mines the Alliance troops had found before their retreat...
...Kandahar, the regime's spiritual center, under siege by opposition Pashtun, the Taliban was on the brink of total collapse. But inside the Pentagon, joy was tempered by the grim knowledge of the threats to American forces on the ground. The pace and scale of the Taliban's retreat last week left U.S. special-ops troops scattered throughout a ravaged land that lacks a central governing authority. Dozens of warlords staked claims to their own pieces of turf, and in several cities, ethnic tensions held the potential for fresh violence. And even as the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Omar...
...siege of Kandahar was the most convincing sign that the Taliban had come undone. The swiftness of the regime's retreat from the north led some allied commanders to warn that the Taliban was conserving its forces and artillery for a ferocious defense of their southern citadel. But it didn't come. As Pashtun opposition forces encircled the city, the Taliban mustered no more than sporadic skirmishing. That, and the week's long string of northern defeats, convinced anti-Taliban Pashtun that they could take down the core Taliban warriors in the south and persuade the rest to switch sides...
...exploded outside his house.) Maybe now, when his Islamic caliphate is collapsing around him, and his big buddy, Osama bin Laden, has crawled deep underground, Mullah Omar doesn't trust anyone within his ranks whose zealotry might be tempered by common sense. "The Prophet and his Followers had to retreat sometimes, but the Almighty Allah will help us prevail against America. We will fight until we are killed," says Agha, whose English is soft yet fierce...