Word: shomali
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...taken the artistry out of the game. "Now it's like children fighting," he complains. "No skill, no technique." So Agha leaves the hilltops of Kabul to a younger generation, who will find new ways to win. These days he heads north on Fridays--kite day--to the Shomali Plains, where he gathers with other old-school flyers in intense matches in which the victor is the last kite flying. In most cases it's Agha's. "Making kites is my job," he says. "Fighting them is my disease...
...says Iran, Russia and Pakistan are throwing money at different candidates. A Kabul black-market money changer claimed that the dollar's recent rise against the afghani, from 52 to 45, was due to the sudden influx of dollars. "In my village," says Fida Mohammed, who is from the Shomali Plain near Kabul, "our elders are seeing who offers us most before telling us how we should vote...
...fortress villages above the Shomali vineyards, more than 600 women vanished in the 1999 Taliban offensive. Yet these abductions are considered such a great dishonor that the victims' families almost never mention them. Says Qadria Yasdon Parast, leader of Freedom Messengers, a Kabul women's rights group: "If you ask about the missing, they'll say, 'Our daughter's dead,' or that she's off married in Pakistan." Many of the women probably did end up in Pakistan--but were sold to brothels or kept as virtual slaves inside homes, say officials from relief agencies. None have come back. Even...
...trail of the missing Shomali women leads to Jalalabad, not far from the Pakistan border. There, according to eyewitnesses, the women were penned up inside Sar Shahi camp in the desert. The more desirable among them were selected and taken away. Some were trucked to Peshawar with the apparent complicity of Pakistani border guards. Others were taken to Khost, where bin Laden had several training camps. The al-Qaeda Arabs had a hard time finding voluntary brides among the Afghan women, but they did have money. One Arab in Khost spent $10,000 on a teenage Afghan beauty, says Ahmad...
Orders to abduct women came from the Taliban leaders, say the Kabul police, but not all commanders obeyed. In the Shomali Plain, Taliban commander Nuruludah says, he saw women being forced onto trucks by Pakistani members of al-Qaeda, so he gathered 10 men, ambushed the trucks and released the women. In Jalalabad too, a few local Taliban eventually stormed the camp and freed the women who remained there. These were the heroic exceptions. For others, apparently, the profound degradation of women seemed perfectly tolerable...