Word: waziristan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Pakistan in 2009 became a viper pit of terrorist plots and political malaise. The death of Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in an August drone strike ratcheted up the stakes. After months of planning, Pakistan's Operation Path to Deliverance sent 28,000 troops to root out insurgents in South Waziristan in October. As threatened, extremists responded by unleashing attacks throughout the country...
Robert Knox, who was Keeper of the Department of Asia at the British Museum until 2006, gave up on coming to Pakistan in 2001 after 9/11. He was working in Bannu agency on the border of Waziristan. Today's it's an active war zone. "We were in Bannu for a very, very long time," says Knox, who excavated there from the mid-1970s to 2001. "We scratched the surface. There's still an enormous amount to do and sites are lost more or less daily. It's almost a free-for-all, particularly in difficult war-like areas...
...catastrophic to lose Gandhara and other ancient civilizations that sprung up along the Indus Valley to direct threats from militants or neglect caused by the security vacuum. "Journalists can't even go there, quite apart from people who want to do field archaeology," he says of the sites near Waziristan and other war-ravaged locations. "I don't think I shall ever see those places again...
...Pakistani Taliban. At least 473 schools across Swat and Federally Administered Tribal Areas have been destroyed over the past two years. Militants recently blew up a 12-room state-run high school and health clinic for boys in Hangu district, a small area nestled on the border of North Waziristan and the North-West Frontier Province. And they routinely blow up girls' schools in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and North-West Frontier Province. Three have been destroyed in the past two weeks. (See pictures of suicide-bomb attacks in Islamabad...
...targeting of schools - especially girls' and co-educational institutions - had long been restricted to the tribal belt in the northwest of the country. But the government offensive against militants in South Waziristan has changed that. A double-suicide attack on the International Islamic University in Islamabad in October sent government officials and parents in cities into a frenzy. Across the country, schools were told to close and security measures quickly improvised. Up to 30 million public and private students from pre-kindergarten through high school were affected, according to the latest figures from the Pakistan Ministry of Education...