Word: swats
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Western" clothes his new bride Cayyada wore as she bundled up in Pakistan's frigid mountain temperatures. For more than a week, the young newlyweds escaped their hectic city lives for a quiet getaway at Malam Jabba, a ski resort located in the heart of the Swat Valley. They shopped for local craftwork, skied at the resort's modest but picturesque slopes and ate various traditional Swati dishes, at times holding hands bashfully. Road closures and blockades were routine - but always due to snowfall...
...Mohammed's success will hinge on his ability to persuade his former acolyte to end his insurgency. Fazlullah learned at the feet of Mohammed in the 1990s, fought alongside him in Swat and later in Afghanistan, and married his daughter. Both men were imprisoned upon their return from Afghanistan, and it was after he was freed that Fazlullah returned to the Swat Valley village of Imam Dheri, operating the yellow-painted chairlift that ferries people across the Swat river. According to local lore, it was after his brother was killed in a U.S. missile strike on the village of Damadola...
...Lengthy queues soon formed by the chairlift, with thousands of worshippers keen to cross the river and attend the militant leader's Friday sermons. Swat's established élite looked on with mounting anxiety. "The followers multiplied inexorably," says a member of Swat's Wali family, the traditional tribal leader, declining to be identified by name. "We were feeling Fazlullah was a political threat. What we built over 150 years could just go in one fatwa. [The militants] played on the deep religious sentiment of the people, their economic deprivation and sense of neglect...
...locals grandees had reason to be worried. The Taliban won support from a section of the poor, residents say, by targeting the wealthy and the powerful, attacking families and driving them out, then looting their abandoned homes. As Swat's notables and lawmakers fled, young, unemployed men suddenly found status as local commanders with large salaries from Fazlullah's mysteriously deep pockets. (Conspiracy theories abound as to the source of his largesse.) But the key to his success, say local observers, was Fazlullah's ability to exploit local resentment at the failings of Pakistan's venal judicial system, in which...
...fate of the Swat deal clear in Islamabad, where it has yet to be ratified by President Asif Ali Zardari, whose government is under pressure from Western allies to take a tougher line against the Taliban. Many in his own party privately express misgivings. "What will stop them from going further?" says one member of parliament who asked not to be named. "I don't want my wife or daughter to wear a burqa. What if they don't lay down their weapons? They could be in Peshawar next, or even Islamabad...