Word: waziristan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...become increasingly embattled in the face of an anti-government campaign, over the past five months, by the charismatic radio preacher Maulana Fazlullah, known as the FM mullah, who has spawned a wave of fundamentalist militancy that has swept from the Afghan frontier through the lawless tribal areas of Waziristan and into the settled areas far from the border. The government of President General Pervez Musharraf seems unable to do anything about...
Currently, the Pakistani army is conflicted over its orders to battle jihadists, says Husain Haqqani, a former senior Pakistani diplomat and political operative who is now a professor at Boston University. "These large numbers of troops who are virtually surrendering themselves to the insurgents in Waziristan without putting up a fight would not have done so if they were not conflicted within themselves," he told a congressional panel recently. "That conflict comes from a belief system after years of having been told that the jihadists represent a force for good. And now that they are being told to fight them...
...soldiers, were killed in fierce fighting in Pakistan's tribal areas last week. Despite promises to the contrary, Musharraf was forced to use aircraft to bomb suspected militant hideouts, escalating the death toll and local anti-government rage. Some analysts are already calling the situation in North and South Waziristan, the locus of the fighting, a "civil war." On Friday, the eighth anniversary of Musharraf's coup, militants publicly beheaded six alleged criminals. A week before they executed three soldiers. "The situation in Waziristan is deteriorating rapidly," says Zafar Iqbal Cheema, chair of the Defense and Strategic Studies department...
...months. Nearly a year ago, Pakistan's military, unable to subdue the insurgency, signed a peace treaty with the militants, but that treaty broke down this summer over a series of strikes against terrorist targets in the border lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Just last week, militants in South Waziristan took around 300 soldiers and security personnel hostage, demanding the withdrawal of troops from the tribal areas in addition to the release of 15 detained insurgents...
...local tribesmen met in a "jirga" and asked the militants to leave. The tribesmen agreed to help them build a seminary but the militants continue to hold the premises at gunpoint. "There are over 250 armed people inside. They came from everywhere. Some of them have come from even Waziristan. They have their own roadblocks and they interrogate strangers," says Ali Gohar, a tribal police official...