Word: warlord
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fighter-bombers overhead. Accompanying them was a band of Afghan fighters and the governor of Helmand, Haji Shir Mohammed. The convoy was on its way to the nearby town of Baghran to meet an aged, white-bearded tribal leader named Rais, better known as "the Baghran"-the most powerful warlord in the area and a possible link to Omar...
...Laden thrives on chaos. In the 1980s his headquarters were in the Sudan while that country was in the throes of civil war. When Sudan threw him out, he relocated to the rubble of Afghanistan. In 1993 bin Laden sent some of his top aides to support the Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid. It was Aidid's forces that later killed 18 U.S. servicemen in an extended fire fight, the one described in the book and film Black Hawk Down...
...Pentagon officials insist that before U.S. planes attacked the convoy, it had fired surface-to-air missiles at them. But in both cases, there are suspicions that U.S. military targeters may have been deliberately provided with bad intelligence by supporters of a local warlord, Pacha Khan Zadran, who may have been using U.S. firepower to settle scores with his rivals in Paktia, a province he hopes to control as governor. "One competitor may be trying to use our capability for his own benefit," says Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...being thrown out of Sudan. The network of man-made caves, which the Russians had found impenetrable during their disastrous occupation of Afghanistan, was the perfect place to wage war but a rotten place to raise a family. There were no "facilities," bin Laden complained to his host, the warlord of the nearby city of Jalalabad. Bin Laden later moved into a compound in Jalalabad that had internal plumbing...
...Even with the Taliban gone, bin Laden has the right connections to disappear. His fairy godfather in the Tora Bora region is a warlord named Younis Khalis, who invited him to Afghanistan in 1996 after even Sudan didn't want him. Khalis lives in an adobe compound a short distance from Jalalabad on the road to Tora Bora. He was close with the Taliban, which used his land as a parking lot for its tanks - more than a dozen of them were blown apart by US missiles and now lie wrecked on Khalis's land. Khalis himself...