Word: shah
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Before dawn on Monday, two huge MH-47 Chinooks, double-headed flying beasts like something out of Tolkien, chugged through the frigid air. They were on their way from Bagram air base, north of Kabul, to Shah-i-Kot and the most intense battle so far of the Afghan war. A force that would eventually grow to more than 1,000 Americans, drawn mainly from the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne divisions, together with Afghan militias and about 200 special forces from allied nations, was engaged with perhaps 1,000 al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters--four times as many enemy...
...just the death of Americans that distinguishes the battle of Shah-i-Kot--or even its intensity. (After a week of fighting, U.S. and French planes were still bombing enemy positions relentlessly.) Privately, in the Pentagon, a conviction is growing that the battle may be a climactic moment in the war. Before Christmas, in the ridges and caves of Tora Bora, the Americans had let their Afghan proxies do most of the fighting on the ground. As a result, hundreds--perhaps thousands--of al-Qaeda fighters escaped to fight another day. In Shah-i-Kot the brunt of the dirty...
...commitment of U.S. power was necessary because of the surprisingly large force arrayed in Shah-i-Kot. Hamid Karzai, the leader of Afghanistan's interim government, called the valley "the last isolated base of terrorism" in his country. Pentagon officials dispute that--a source says there are still major pockets of resistance around Herat and Kandahar--but acknowledge that the number of enemy troops in Shah-i-Kot was extraordinary...
...other thing about the Taliban and al-Qaeda warriors at Shah-i-Kot: they fought to the death. That may be because the Arabs, Chechens and Uzbeks among them have nowhere to go, save Guantanamo Bay. But their ferocity may have another cause. In the caves on the snow-covered ridges may hide some top al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, including, possibly, one of the big three, Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Ayman al-Zawahiri. "There's no question that these people didn't just happen to all meet there," says Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "There's clearly leadership...
...sides of the same coin. The Americans have always known that Paktia province, where the fighting is taking place, is bandit country. (Ironically, the new governor of the province, and Karzai's voice there, is an American citizen: Taj Muhammad Wardak spent the past decade in Los Angeles.) Shah-i-Kot was a well-known base for the mujahedin fighting Soviet forces in the 1980s; indeed, the Soviets never took the valley. The soft shale on the ridges is ideal for the construction of caves. One cave, visited last week by a TIME reporter, was at least 40 yards deep...