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/ 10 September 2004
Tomorrow is the third anniversary of the epoch-shaping onslaught on New York and Washington but a string of other al-Qaeda attacks since 1998 has left little mark on our consciousness. What has terrorism done to the lives of ordinary people from Casablanca to Karachi? Reporters asked nine people living in the shadow of the bombers.
United States Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged on Friday that pre-war information he gave the United Nations on Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons laboratories to justify the US-led war on Iraq was not ”solid”. The administration of US President George Bush has also been accused of blocking the commission of enquiry into the September 11 attacks.
Pakistani troops battling suspected al-Qaeda fighters in Pakistan’s lawless north this week discovered a 1,6km-long tunnel running through the battlefield, through which senior al-Qaeda members may have escaped, officials said. Several tunnels were discovered leading from a huddle of fiercely defended mud fortresses near Afghanistan’s border.
Qummergal grimaced as she bared her face to a camera for the first time. But when she saw her portrait, she giggled with delight. ”I can’t believe it’s me,” she said. ”Look at me. It’s wonderful!” Qummergal was registering to vote in Afghanistan’s first elections since the advent of war 25 years ago.
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/ 15 December 2003
Across impoverished southern and eastern Afghanistan, the Taliban’s tribal homeland, a desperate pattern is emerging. Military analysts and aid agency bosses in Kabul say the US’s two-year military campaign has failed to root out the Taliban or to bring peace.
Lawyers campaigning to win more than £10-million compensation from the Ministry of Defence for hundreds of Kenyan women who say they were raped by British soldiers said yesterday that they would urgently investigate fresh allegations about the authenticity of some of the claims.
A Boeing 727 cargo plane which caused panic among US intelligence agencies after mysteriously disappearing from Angola’s main airport turned up last week in Guinea.
Liberia’s embattled president, Charles Taylor, accepted an offer of asylum in Nigeria yesterday but gave no indication of when he would leave and insisted that it must be an ”orderly exit from power”.
The road to Monrovia is a bloodstained path strewn with surreal violence. More than 400 000 people have been killed and millions displaced in a tangled regional conflict characterised by extreme violence.
It was time for a break at Clay Junction, Liberia’s front line about 50 kilometres north of the capital, Monrovia, and the kids wanted something to smoke. Boy soldiers in women’s wigs and girl soldiers in shower caps loitered by the road or practised penalties with spent sub-machine-gun cartridges.