Word: warlords
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...From the beginning of its Afghan campaign, the U.S. has relied heavily on electronic surveillance in a country where men on the ground can frequently outwit spies in the sky. The U.S. has apparently been close several times to killing the notorious warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, wanted for sponsoring attacks on foreign troops and their Afghan allies. But last week he sent a gloating videotape to a news station in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar, jauntily recounting the near misses by U.S. troops tracking him. On one occasion, he says, he survived by climbing up a mountain 180 meters from...
...Federal Government's standoff with a religious group in Waco, Texas. But the experience that perhaps marked him most came six months later, in October 1993, in downtown Mogadishu. He and his troops were there when 18 soldiers died in an effort to snatch a Somali warlord--a tough day immortalized in Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down. Boykin told a Florida audience last year that he collapsed in his bunk that day, angry that God had let him down. "There is no God," Boykin sobbed in the wake of their deaths. "If there was a God, he would...
...Madame Chiang became her husband's interpreter, confidant 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. Madame Chiang flew to the rescue and challenged Zhang so eloquently that he released his captive and agreed to return to Nanking as a prisoner of the Chiangs. Madame Chiang then devoted her energies to tidying up her disheveled country. In 1934 she joined her husband in launching...
...knew that my god was bigger than his," said Lieut. General William Boykin, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, referring to a Somali warlord he once crossed swords with. The echo of a famous dog-food commercial was unintentional, we must hope. Presumably, Boykin's God does not eat Ken-L Ration. But maybe Boykin does so himself, because he's a mighty frisky fella...
...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...