Word: rocketings
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...most traditional Afghan art form?the Oriental rug. Two Afghan tribal groups, the Chahar Aimaq and the Baloch, expanded their color palette and changed their subject matter to reflect the jarring reality that their homeland had become a battlefield. Over the next decade, they produced carpets featuring rocket launchers, machine guns, bombs, and helicopter gunships. In lesser numbers, these carpets are still produced. Collectors describe them as a vital emotional response to the country's devastation, souvenirs for departing Soviet soldiers, and profit engines to raise cash for mujahedin guerrillas...
...most subtly resonant of the rugs are those in which a rocket launcher replaces a traditional filigree theme, a tank substitutes for an octagon, or a minaret is swapped for a gun barrel?those where the war has just begun to impose itself on an otherwise eternal field. The changed landscape of these carpets echoes the changed landscape of the weavers' own countryside: a sky that had seen so few commercial jetliners becomes filled with bombers and missiles. In some of the later rugs, war machinery overwhelms the entire weave. All the traditional imagery has been obliterated, leaving two giant...
...left Sabena to take over Swissair's French airline operations in August 2000. Veteran Lufthansa executive Christoph Müller took over as Sabena CEO and immediately realized the danger. Within a month he outlined a drastic restructuring plan, dubbed Blue Sky. "You didn't need to be a rocket scientist" to know Sabena was in serious trouble, Müller says. "You just needed to read the balance sheet." The Airbus deal in particular saddled Sabena with impossible red ink. Müller points out that the Sabena order at the time was twice the stock-market value...
...force of 2,500 between them. The biggest, he claims, has 26 interconnected bunkers complete with kitchens, lecture halls, telephones and televisions concealed beneath a three-meter-high false forest floor that stretches between two hills. Weapons available for training there include AK-47s, heavy machine guns, rifles, pistols, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. Mantraps and mines, which can be triggered by spotters hiding in tree houses, protect approaches to the camp...
...forces engaged in the war on terrorism are also under attack in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies are waging a guerrilla campaign in the south and east of the country, with rocket attacks on U.S. bases becoming an almost daily affair. And in the Philippines last Wednesday, a U.S. soldier was killed by a nail bomb thrown from a motorcycle in an attack blamed on the radical Islamist Abu Sayyaf group, whose operations have been the focus of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts there...