Word: sharif
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Across the liberated provinces, Afghans have feared a return to pre-Taliban civil strife. Pashtun farmers have lived in the northern plains around Mazar-i-Sharif for a century, but now many have had enough. With 32 other families, a farmer named Saidu walked for 15 days through cannon fire and biting wind to reach a bleak refugee camp in the Pashtun desert of the south. "I've suffered too much," he said. "I'm not going back up north, not if [Northern Alliance leader Burhanuddin] Rabbani is ruler or Dostum. They'll kill us Pashtun." The country could...
...children and grandchildren huddled around him in a tiny, open tent of sticks and stitched sacks, the 65-year-old brushes away tears as he describes his prospects in the coming Afghan winter. Freezing rain and snow will cover the Dehdadi camp on the southern outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif, home to 15,000 refugees. Temperatures will drop to 5[degrees]F, and the filthy roadside ditch from which the refugees fetch their gray fetid water will freeze...
After three years of drought, five years of failed harvests and 22 years of war, the refugees have exhausted their meager savings and killed their livestock. In August the camps around Mazar-i-Sharif had a two-week supply of food. After Sept. 11 all aid was suspended as agencies withdrew; 230 have died in Dehdadi since then. Others have fled into the frozen mountains rather than live in a war zone. Without food or water, many have surely perished. Now, with the Taliban's retreat, the way to better-supplied camps near Pakistan is open--but many...
...every mountain pass. Pilfering is rife; Alliance soldiers and local aid workers divert much of the food, medicine and blankets to their families or to bazaars. To speed up the deliveries, aid workers plan to have hundreds of French soldiers secure a "humanitarian corridor" from Uzbekistan to Mazar-i-Sharif. But the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan brings its own difficulties. When word of the French reached Mazar-i-Sharif's bazaar, young men ran to fetch their guns to fight the "invaders...
...wept on Sept. 9, the day two al-Qaeda agents posing as journalists assassinated the rebel leader in a suicide bomb attack. In death, Massoud has become even more iconic than in life. His picture hangs in shop windows across the northern Afghan capital of Mazar-i-Sharif and is pasted in the windshields of Alliance pickups and jeeps. Along every street those calm, hooded eyes gaze out from their baggy sockets. He's the Che Guevara of northern Afghanistan, its Mandela, Marley, JFK. (Nearly anyone you ask can recall where he or she was when the news...