Word: anwar
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...close friends familiar with Basa's activities, his daring had earned him a nickname. He was the "Hero of the Crossing," the same admiring sobriquet awarded Anwar Sadat after the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal during the 1973 October War with Israel. Now, at 40, with a wife and nine children safely out of Kuwait, Basa was headed for jail with phony papers identifying him as a citizen of Qatar. "That's what saved me," says Basa, recalling the story he had carefully rehearsed against the possibility of capture. "I told the Iraqis that I was just another expatriate...
Talk of Arab unity has usually been just that -- talk. Since the Arab League's founding in 1945 as a loose federation of seven states, issues of wealth, territory, sovereignty and political influence have splintered the alliance. With Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1977, the one issue that had always rallied unanimous support -- Arab hatred of the state of Israel -- proved divisive too. Through the 1980s, the cleavages seemed only to widen as the members of the Arab League, now 21 strong, lined up on different sides in the Iran-Iraq war and split their loyalties...
...Mohammad Anwar, 13, has fought in seven battles, and during the last one, an assault on a government garrison outside the village of Dara Noor, he killed at close range for the first time. He had followed the fighters through mined fields, running like crazy, and was in the first wave that captured the enemy post. He and a friend came upon three soldiers scrambling down a hill. His friend shot one. Mohammad Anwar shot the other two, thumping the bodies with his rifle butt to make sure they were dead, then calmly removing a revolver from the first corpse...
Asked what he thinks about killing, Mohammad Anwar looks puzzled. "I was happy because I killed them," he says. During the attack, Mohammad Anwar's older brother and some other mujahedin seized four soldiers. They bound the prisoners' hands, blindfolded them and marched them to Dara Noor. After the mullah arrived, they lined up the captives and shot them. Mohammad Anwar and his friend watched. How did he feel about that? He lifts an eyebrow and this time answers deliberately, as if talking to a slow-witted child. "I was happy," he says...
...goatherd's son, Mohammad Anwar has been fighting since he was ten. He has never been to school and insists that he is glad not to have to go. With his olive-brown eyes and brown curls peeping out from under his wool cap, he looks like any of the thousands of Afghan boys who loiter, energetic and restless, in Pakistani refugee camps. But there is something different about him. It is not in his face, which is babyish, or his hands, callused and blackened. It is the look behind his eyes, the dulled expression of a seasoned grunt...