Word: mazar
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...election day got underway in the north, the streets were calm in Mazar-i-Sharif, a largely ethnic Tajik city. At a girls school that had been turned into a voting station, Assadullah, 52, casually checked incoming voters on polling day Thursday. The Tajik security guard himself was a partisan of Abdullah Abdullah. In a way, he was following orders. Assadullah had once fought under Mohammad Atta, an ex-mujahideen commander who now governs the province and who has thrown his support behind Abdullah. Meanwhile, Palwasha, 19, a beaming first-time voter, giggled as she declined a request to reveal...
...That question is especially urgent in Afghanistan. Germany is the third biggest troop contributor to the NATO-led international peacekeeping force there, with 3,700 German troops serving in Kabul and in northern Afghanistan, around Mazar-e-Sharif, where Germany heads the northern regional command. More German soldiers are now being sent to Afghanistan in the run-up to the elections in August, bringing the total number to 4,200 by late summer. There are also plans to send 300 more German troops to the country to help support NATO's deployment of surveillance aircraft...
...Afghan proxies. One of the worst offenders, alleges Samimi, is Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic-Uzbek warlord who helped in the triumphant ousting of the Taliban in 2001, when, backed by U.S. special forces, he led hundreds of men on horseback to liberate the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Dostum's militia is accused of that war's worst human-rights atrocity, in which hundreds of his captives suffocated to death after having been locked inside shipping containers. He denies the charges. Samimi is not concerned about Dostum's wartime activities--few if any of Afghanistan's leaders...
...tomorrow. And so follow the boundaries of the nation's tiny tourism industry. The few foreign tourists who come to Afghanistan, estimated to number under a thousand yearly, need plenty of help to pull off their holidays safely. In cities like Kabul, Herat, Faizabad and Mazar-i-Sharif, a small legion of Afghans who spent the last seven years as translators and security aides are spinning their expertise at navigating this shifting landscape into a new business. Now, they are also tour guides...
...meantime, he and Mann continue to organize tours to sites like Bamian and Qala-i-Jangi, a 19th century fortress some 12 miles (20 km) outside Mazar and one of the sites of final resistance by the Taliban against the Northern Alliance and the U.S.-led forces in 2001. Today, the bullet holes along the walls of the fortress remain unplastered. Shoib Najafizada, Afghan Logistics and Tours' man in Mazar, leads visitors around the rusty remnants of tanks and heavy artillery that lie strewn around. Like other guides, Najafizada offers firsthand accounts of some of the key moments...