Word: zahir
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Back on the outskirts of Kandahar, the Taliban is stopping families at gunpoint and turning them back from the road to Pakistan. Muammer Zahir, a twentysomething truck driver, was able to dodge the checkpoint. "What will the Americans attack?" he asks. "Our houses are already destroyed by years of fighting." U.N. officials say the Taliban is still letting some women and children head toward the frontier?but only after the men traveling in the party are forcibly conscripted. Relief officials have coined a new word to describe these poor Afghans: the "internally stuck." And nobody wants to be stuck...
...determining a future government. Rather than Rabbani - whose tenure is remembered as an era of corruption and vicious civil war in which tens of thousands of civilians were killed as rival factions battled for control of the capital - the West has enlisted the help of the former king, Zahir Shah, who has been living in the suburbs of Rome since being deposed in a 1973 coup. Western strategy appears to have combined a sharp increase in aid to the United Front with the matchmaking of a political alliance between them and the king. Intense negotiations last weekend produced a "Supreme...
...will be replaced by professionals who are not part of local power structures. Anyone trying to do this in Khost could be in for a tough time. The brothers, fervent royalists, fly the royal banner from official buildings, not the current national flag, and pictures of deposed King Mohammed Zahir Shah adorn their cars. Their own way of ruling has a regal feel. The 55-year-old Pachakhan, Governor of three provinces, is an irascible potentate who holds court in the time-honored manner, seated on cushions at the far end of a long audience room. A bandolier hangs over...