Word: turkmen
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...Hundreds of thousands of Kurds, Turkmen and other minorities have been deported out of the city for the last decades, replaced by Arabs with the goal of cementing Baghdad's claim on the city - and its nearby oil fields. Pessimists suggested that it was the place where everything in this war could go wrong. Kurds could take the city - which they regard as their Jerusalem - for themselves. The Turks would fear that revenues from the oil fields would allow the Kurds to create a viable independent state, thus destabilizing its own large Kurdish minority. So Turkey would send in tens...
...Saddam's ethnic cleansing campaign over the past decade have vowed to return and claim their property. But Turkey sees Kurdish control of Kirkuk as unacceptable, both because it would strengthen Kurdish autonomy in a new Iraq and because they see the city's rightful owners as the Turkmen minority, which has a long history of conflict with the Kurds...
MEANWHILE Mommy's Boy While the name for the present decade is still in doubt, Turkmenistan's national assembly has cleared up the name for 2003: "The year of the Turkmen heroine Gurbansoltan edzhe, the mother of the first and eternal President of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Turkmenbashi." The decision follows the renaming of April - now "Mother" - after the President's mom, who died when he was eight...
...From first light on Sunday, women in thick brown veils, families on donkey carts and men dangling chickens from bicycle handlebars throng the streets. A riot of headgear?Mao caps, white Kyrgyz ak-kalpaks, woolly Turkmen telpeks and the black-velvet hats of local Uighurs?reveals the diversity of the traders. Behind food stands, cooks dish out noodles; grinning barbers with wicked blades offer death-defying shaves. This is the place to buy a fur coat or an intricately inlaid knife. Or, less exotic but well traveled, a bottle of Head & Shoulders shampoo...
...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 on. "In 1989 he had a budget for 45,000 troops, but we knew he had only 25,000 on his payroll," says a former Soviet diplomat. "When our advisers confronted him over it, he'd laugh...