Word: warlord
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...home is Nurzai, 24, who straggles by, carrying a blanket full of long grass over his shoulder, food for the sheep he tends. He says he was captured in Kunduz and, like thousands of other prisoners, stuffed into a shipping container and ferried to Sheberghan by troops loyal to warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. Hundreds died in the heat inside those metal boxes. Shown pictures of the prisoners, Nurzai names three he recognizes. "I was an innocent," he says, claiming he had been conscripted into the Taliban army months earlier. But moments later he admits he volunteered for service four years...
...assassin believed responsible for the murders of three opponents to the fundamentalist movement in Quetta in Pakistan in the mid-1990s. A veteran of the Kunduz and Takhar fronts during the Taliban's civil war with the United Front, Rehman was captured last year by the forces of northern warlord General Rashid Dostum. He was released earlier this year, most likely after his family paid the almost $900 ransom that was demanded to free each of the Taliban captives. Rahman returned to his village but soon after moved south to Kandahar. There he "used all his efforts to join...
...attacks follow public statements by elements close to al-Qaeda and the Taliban promising a new guerrilla campaign against the U.S. and the Karzai government. Earlier this week, the notorious Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar declared a 'jihad' for the ouster of foreign forces from Afghanistan. With Karzai's authority limited to the capital, much of the countryside in the hands of fickle warlords and many Pashtuns suspicious of the disproportionate dominance of ethnic Tajiks in his government, the remnants of the Taliban may be finding fertile ground for a resurgence. Beside the bomb blasts and assassination attempts in the capital...
...Reports have suggested variously that Iran continues to back Herat warlord Ismail Khan (hardliners in Tehran may even be assisting Hekmatyar, despite his expulsion by the government in February), that Russia is backing the Pansjiris and that elements in Pakistan may be harboring Taliban and al-Qaeda elements to make their own proxy bid for power in Kabul if the U.S. begins to withdraw...
...Without a strong army, Karzai has little chance of taming warlords like Zadran. And the U.S. still needs him to hunt for al-Qaeda (although officially a top American diplomat in Kabul says the U.S. military is no longer cooperating with Zadran). "Al-Qaeda is hunkered down waiting for an opening," says another diplomat in Kabul, "and a defection from a regional warlord could provide the cover that would allow these guys to climb out of their holes...