Word: uzbek
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...trained to keep his nerve. But as he sat in the backseat of a minivan last month, tearing through the badlands along the Afghan border with four heavily armed al-Qaeda members beside him, Niazi may have sensed he was riding to his death. Niazi had spent weeks befriending Uzbek al-Qaeda fighters, posing as a smuggler who could take them safely into the frontier city of Peshawar. Now he had lured the Uzbeks into the trap. He would drive them into an ambush in which Pakistani police would capture al-Qaeda fighters alive. From there they would be flown...
...story had a posthumous twist. Through Niazi's good intelligence work, authorities were able to find a fifth al-Qaeda man, also an Uzbek, who is now in U.S. custody. But the scene of the roadside shoot-out resembles a makeshift shrine to fallen al-Qaeda fighters. Graffiti glorifying Osama bin Laden have been painted on the rocks, and pilgrims flock to the spot in busloads. Some say they can smell the fragrance of martyrs' paradise wafting from the bloodstains in the dirt. And Niazi's father considers his son a traitor to Muslims. He refused to say the customary...
...tribal northwest. The soldiers closed in at night on a village in the Waziristan region to arrest the fighters hiding in the house of a local elder. As troops approached, the al-Qaeda loyalists opened fire. After a four-hour battle, two fighters were killed and one, an Uzbek teen, was captured; 32 others escaped. Soldiers found a cache of heavy arms including rocket-propelled grenades before the compound was razed to the ground. MEANWHILE Peace Pills In a finding reminiscent of the happy drug soma in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, U.K. researchers have discovered that maximum-security...
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...
MAZAR-I-SHARIF The country's most celebrated warlord, Uzbek ABDUL RASHID DOSTUM has long been a strongman in the north. Though he still commands some 7,000 troops, lately his influence has been eroded by the rising power of Tajik USTAD ATTA MOHAMMED, whose force of 5,000 controls much of Mazar. Sporadic clashes between the rival factions have been temporarily defused...