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/ 5 September 2006
The line snaked past the Canadian embassy in Beirut on a sweltering afternoon. Sandra fanned herself with the visa application she prayed was her ticket out of Lebanon. ”I can’t live here any more,” said the 35-year-old university researcher, who gave only her first name. ”This war was the final straw.”
When the guns went silent in Aitta Shaab, a war-ravaged village close to the Israeli border, three children skipped through the rubble looking for a little fun. Hurdling over lumps of crushed concrete and dodging spikes of twisted metal, Sukna, Hassan and Merwa, aged 10 to 12, paused before a curious object. Sukna picked it up.
The United States government said it could not find the men that Guantánamo detainee Abdullah Mujahid believes could help set him free. The Guardian found them in three days. Two years ago the American military invited Mujahid, a former Afghan police commander accused of plotting against the US, to prove his innocence before a special military tribunal.
Many great armies have rolled through Maiwand. Over the centuries Persians, Moghuls and Russians have traversed the ramshackle hamlet on the sun-baked plains of western Kandahar. But nobody has forgotten the British. ”Even a child knows the history,” snorted 85-year-old Muhammad Amman, recalling a battle 126 years ago.
The Afghanistan province being patrolled by British troops will produce at least a third of the world’s heroin this year, according to drug experts who are forecasting a record harvest that will be an embarrassment for the Western-funded war on narcotics. British officials are bracing themselves for the result of an annual United Nations poppy survey.
Azizullah, the serious-minded son of a Pakistani farmer, yearned for martyrdom. The Taliban made his wish come true. The zealots inspired him to jihad, trained him to shoot and dispatched him to fight the infidel Americans across the border in Afghanistan. So it was fitting that after he died, trapped under a hail of American firepower, a procession of black-turbaned men brought him home.
Since the Western-led war on drugs started four years ago, only two major drug smugglers have been arrested — Haji Baz Muhammad, who was extradited to the United States last October, and Bashir Noorzai, who was arrested in New York six months earlier. But the remainder are apparently untouchable.
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/ 10 January 2006
The reopening of the Afghan Parliament last month was hailed as another step towards stability after a quarter century of chaos. But four years after the fall of the Taliban, many Afghans are growing impatient with a democracy that has produced many elections but failed to significantly improve their living standards.
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/ 18 November 2005
Stark choices face Sultan Rehman, a farmer stranded high in a valley devastated by the earthquake, and time is running out. One month ago the 7,6 magnitude earthquake violently upended his peaceful world in Sosal, a small hamlet perched on a mountain ledge about 130km north of Islamabad. His house was crushed, his brother was killed, and his family was left clinging to life in perilous conditions.
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/ 24 October 2005
Arriving by donkey, helicopter, or on the shoulders of desperate relatives, grievously injured villagers are still streaming into makeshift hospitals in northern Pakistan 16 days after the earthquake that destroyed their world. By mid-afternoon on Sunday 420 patients had passed through a well-equipped field hospital run by army medics from the United Arab Emirates.