Word: shibarghan
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Born to a poor Uzbek farming family, Dostum had little formal education and worked in the natural-gas fields near Shibarghan before joining the military during communist rule in Afghanistan. By the mid-1980s he was in command first of a militia battalion, then of a division. His big break came with the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan in 1988-89. As the troop convoys headed home and the rebel mujahedin sharpened their knives, Dostum and his Soviet-funded army of tough Uzbek and Turkmen irregulars emerged as the only real mobile outfit the communist regime of President Najibullah could count...
...Born to a poor Uzbek farming family, Dostum had little formal education and worked in the natural-gas fields near Shibarghan before joining the military during communist rule in Afghanistan. By the mid-1980s he was in command first of a militia battalion, then of a division. His big break came with the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan in 1988-89. As the troop convoys headed home and the rebel mujahedin sharpened their knives, Dostum and his Soviet-funded army of tough Uzbek and Turkmen irregulars emerged as the only real mobile outfit the communist regime of President Najibullah could count...
...long as anyone can remember, villagers called it Tillya Tepe-the Golden Mound. Even so, no one dreamed of the precious relics that might be unearthed in the strange, 12-ft.-high rise of ground located in a cotton field three miles north of the town of Shibarghan in northern Afghanistan. In 1977 a Soviet-Afghan archaeological team began serious excavations. By last fall they had uncovered the mud-brick columns and cross-shaped altar of an ancient temple dating back to at least 1000 B.C. Then they struck pay dirt-a glittering trove of gold that some Soviets said...
...Soviet archaeologists conjecture that the buried nobles of Shibarghan were members of a local ruling family in the midst of this dark period. One sign of kinship: two skeletons bore rings of identical design. Sarianidi's theory is that a family patriarch stumbled upon the long buried temple and appropriated it as a royal necropolis. For 200 years successive generations were apparently buried at the unmarked site, probably by night to outwit grave robbers...
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