Word: revoltingly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ruled out. Some Washington contingency planners feared that the Soviets might use their new base in Afghanistan to encourage unrest among the Pushtun and Baluch peoples who populate the border areas and are openly hostile to the Pakistan government. A major fear was that the Soviets might sponsor a revolt by the Baluch, whose traditional homeland stretches along the Arabian Sea into eastern Iran. Such a breakaway by Baluchistan would give Moscow access to ports leading into the Indian Ocean, threaten the Persian Gulf oil supply routes, and probably lead to the end of Pakistan as a viable state...
Some observers distinguish two stages in the entire upheaval: the first a popular revolt that overthrew the Shah, then a "Khomeini coup" that concentrated all power in the clergy. The Ayatullah's main instrument was a stream of elamiehs (directives) from Qum, many issued without consulting Bazargan's nominal government. Banks and heavy industry were nationalized and turned over to government managers. Many of the elamiehs were concerned with imposing a strict Islamic...
...Ayatullah capture a revolution that started out as a leaderless explosion of resentment and hate? Primarily by playing adroitly to, and in part embodying, some of the psychological elements that made the revolt possible. There was, for example, a widespread egalitarian yearning to end the extremes of wealth and poverty that existed under the Shah ?and the rich could easily be tarred as clients of the "U.S. imperialists." Partly because of the long history of Soviet, British and then American meddling in their affairs, Iranians were and are basically xenophobic, and thus susceptible to the Ayatullah's charges that...
Ominously for Taraki and the Soviets, however, there were already rumblings of revolt among conservative Muslim tribesmen unhappy at the prospect of radical social and economic reforms. As the Marxists in Kabul pressed their case, the opposition gradually developed into a full-scale religious insurgency. In March, thousands of Afghans in Herat (pop. 150,000), a provincial capital 400 miles west of Kabul, rose in a revolt that lasted for several days. An estimated 20,000 civilians lost their lives; so did at least 20 Soviet advisers and their families in a series of brutal rebel attacks...
...slaughter of the Huguenots in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572; skirmishes still go on between Catholic and Huguenot. Town and countryside are periodically ravaged by roving bands of brigand soldiers. Class bitterness over increasingly burdensome taxes breaks out in tax strikes, urban unrest and peasant revolt. It all coils up toward Mardi Gras, culminating in a bloody midnight clash...