Word: mullahs
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...Zhari is strategically crucial, the gateway to Kandahar city from the west, the staging area for most Taliban activity in the region. It is a largely rural district straddling the Afghan Ring Road and the Arghandab River. It includes the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar's hometown of Sangsar. The Taliban aren't outside agitators here; they are neighbors - not exactly beloved neighbors, given their propensity for violence and peremptory taxation, but more trustworthy than a deeply corrupt Afghan government and much more familiar than the foreign troops. Senjaray is the largest population center, a town of somewhere from...
...Karzai is also at odds with the Obama Administration over how to pursue the planned reconciliation outreach to the insurgents. The Afghan leader insists that such efforts will only bring peace if they include negotiations with senior Taliban leaders like Mullah Omar, but right now the U.S. insists that outreach efforts must be confined to peeling off what it calls the "accidental terrorists" - those who joined the Taliban for money or as a result of tribal connections - while continuing to hunt down the pro-al-Qaeda leaders of the Afghan insurgency, which would include Mullah Omar...
...Seared by the humiliations of Guantánamo, Rasoul immediately rejoined the Taliban insurgency, bent on revenge. Better known by his nom de guerre, Mullah Abdullah Zakir, he is now believed by Afghan and NATO intelligence officers to be the Taliban's new field commander, responsible for a string of bombings and ambushes in southern Afghanistan over the past year that have killed dozens of NATO troops (and which killed more than 30 people in a series of bombings in Kandahar over the weekend). He is believed to have assumed overall responsibility for Taliban military operations from the movement...
...Zakir, meanwhile, was engaged in hunger strikes to protest what he claimed was the guards' "disrespect to the Koran." Throughout his interrogation, he managed to hide the fact that he had been one of Taliban leader Mullah Omar's trusted deputies and a front-line commander against the forces of Northern Alliance chieftain Ahmed Shah Masood. Zakir duped his interrogators into believing that he was a nobody who had been dragooned into the ranks of the Taliban and who had never even heard of Osama bin Laden. All Prisoner No. 8 wanted, he told a military review board...
...those of the Taliban leadership. As such, he may be poised to play a key role in any future peace talks between Karzai and the Taliban's governing council. And, according to Zaeef, there is room for maneuver. He insists that the Taliban are not fighting to regain power. "Mullah Omar says he doesn't want to destroy [Karzai's] government, but only to repair it." But, he adds, "Mullah Omar also wants to free the country from the foreigners." (See a story about Afghanistan's drug problem...