Word: warlord
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sacco gives us the history of these morally ambiguous warlords who he describes as "military pop idols." While defending the city they confiscate storehouses, evict Muslims from their homes, conscript citizens by gunpoint and are eventually implicated in massacres and "ethnic cleansing." Neven adds his own story to these, like the time he shot an enemy through his gun holster while falling backwards. Or did he? Sacco parallels his increasing doubts about the authenticity of Neven's tales while getting deeper into the warlord's atrocities. By the end, "The Fixer" becomes as much about the haziness and relative importance...
...Madame Chiang became her husband's interpreter, confidante and chief propagandist. Not only did she try to save his soul (by converting him from paganism to Christianity), she also helped save his life. In 1936, on an inspection tour in Xi'an, Chiang was detained by troops of disaffected warlord Zhang Xueliang. Mei-ling flew to the rescue and challenged Zhang so eloquently that he released his captive and agreed to return to Nanjing as a prisoner of the Chiangs. Mei-ling then devoted her energies to tidying up her disheveled country...
...Still, the echoes from the Nanjing Decade won't go away, providing an intriguing template from the past. In each case, the ruling party could draw support from the living memory of the chaos that preceded its rule: the postimperial warlord era for the nationalists, the Cultural Revolution for the post-Mao communists. But the fundamental question of the basis of a regime's legitimacy is as pertinent today as it was in the 1930s...
...than 500 hundred Somali militiamen. On Oct. 3, 1993, a team of U.S. special operations soldiers—mainly from Delta Force and the Army Rangers—was airdropped into the city’s volatile Bakara Market neighborhood. Their assignment: to capture two prominent lieutenants of Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid. What followed was, as Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden notes, “the longest sustained firefight involving U.S. troops since Vietnam...
...Laden and the terrorist camps of al-Qaeda. General Garni, military commander of Zabul, speculated last week that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's one-eyed Commander of the Faithful, might be hiding in the province's mountains with 800 men. The Taliban has deepened its alliance with warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his fundamentalist, anti-Western Hizb-i-Islami Party, which remains potent in eastern Afghanistan. Hekmatyar used to have close ties to Iran, and Pakistani sympathizers of the Taliban say Tehran may be secretly bankrolling the rebels to tie down U.S. troops in Afghanistan...