Word: fled
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...weeks before Saturday's assault, NATO aircraft dropped thousands of leaflets urging civilians to leave Marja until the fighting was over and the town had been re-captured. Over 100,000 Pashtuns live around Marja, but only several thousand fled. Fleeing families told journalists on the road that the Taliban had ordered Marja's people to stay behind, giving them a human shield to hide behind as the NATO forces closed in. Others said their relatives could not leave because the roads outside their homes were too heavily mined...
...Taliban, retreating from Marja gives them a chance to strike again, avoiding face-to-face combat with a larger and mightier enemy. Though some Marja refugees said that many Afghan Taliban may have fled, they also said a large contingent of more zealous Pakistani fighters stayed behind, bent on martyrdom. That is possible; after decades of war, Afghans have developed a keen instinct about when to fight, and when to slip away...
...Western forces have announced their plans to the local population while moving into position. Pentagon officials say this unusually public "shaping" of the battlefield has one key goal: while hundreds of hard-core Taliban are hunkering down for a fight, many more, along with thousands of residents, have fled Marja until the dust settles. That should limit civilian casualties and, they hope, lure some lukewarm Taliban over to the government side. "We're not interested in how many Taliban we kill," Army General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S., commander in Afghanistan, said Thursday. "We'd much rather have them...
...great societal significance. Savannah is interested in special education, in part because her neighbor at the beach, the appealingly humble Tim (Henry Thomas), has an autistic child and John has a slightly autistic father (it was Asperger's in the book). In both cases, the bad wives have fled, scared off by the autism, presumably. Richard Jenkins plays John's dad, and though the role doesn't require him to do much more than fondle a coin collection and avoid direct eye contact, his understated performance makes Mr. Tyree the film's most touching character. (See the top 10 movies...
...John is a semi-recovered gambling addict, who fled Las Vegas after some unnamed fiscal disaster and got himself a desk job at an insurance company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The only good part of his boring job is sharing a cubicle wall with Jill (Sarah Silverman), a buxom administrative drone who has her own addiction issues revolving around compulsive collecting of smiley face paraphernalia. (This seems like recycled, or at least, unimaginative material, and Silverman is shamefully wasted on a character just there to be mocked). John's only chance at making more money is to accept a challenge...