Dust dims Central Asia

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Dust dims Central Asia, highlighting difficulty of mounting attacks

By Jim Heintz, Associated Press, 10/5/2001 12:41

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan (AP) The jagged brown mountains that usually provide a stunning frame for the Tajik capital have disappeared behind a heavy cloak of dust and haze, a reminder of the challenge that weather poses to mounting a military campaign in Central Asia.

The dust that has cast a hangover-gray pall over Dushanbe since Tuesday is only one of the troubles faced by fighting forces in one of the most meteorologically severe parts of the world.

The 1,000 troops that the United States dispatched to neighboring Uzbekistan on Friday as part of a military buildup ahead of a possible strike on Afghanistan may count themselves fortunate if they only have to battle dust. Much worse weather is likely in Afghanistan in a few weeks.

The dust has grounded the daily helicopter run for journalists organized by the Dushanbe embassy affiliated with opponents of the Taliban militia that controls most of Afghanistan.

More than 700 foreign journalists have streamed into Dushanbe in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackings in the United States, said Suleiman Rashidov, a press attache at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Most of them are aiming to go to Afghanistan, where the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Osama bin Laden, is based.

But the dirty haze has made such flights unthinkable. Tajikistan is no place to be flying blind mountains and strings of flat-topped cliffs jut up abruptly at several points in the 90 miles between Dushanbe and the Afghan border.

Even if a helicopter braved the flight, the dust in Afghanistan turns life on the ground into a constant torment. It parches mouths and even when motor vehicles travel at a crawl, they kick up a cloud that reduces visibility to about 10 feet.

For all that, conditions in Afghanistan are on the verge of getting worse.

Russian soldiers familiar with Afghanistan from their own experience in the Soviet Union's disastrous war there in the 1980s say that the winter weather just a few weeks away will compound problems.

In the lower altitudes, winter rains turn the dust into a sucking soup of mud that mires vehicles on Afghanistan's generally wretched roads.

In the mountains, heavy snow blocks passes and high-altitude valleys become blanketed in dense fogs.

Journalists in Dushanbe were frantically looking for alternatives to get into Afghanistan and clustering outside the Foreign Ministry to trade rumors about resumed flights or possible overland convoys.

Going into Afghanistan by land, if authorities allow such crossings, can be a long and grueling trip. The roads are so sparse and poor that mules may be a better alternative than motor vehicles.

Nonetheless, amid the frustration there was some private quiet relief regarding the grounded flights.

''The helicopter trip is what I'm dreading. I hear they're held together with string,'' a journalist from the United Kingdom said earlier in the week.

The Russian-built Mi-8 helicopters that are the workhorses of Central Asian short-hop flying are widely disliked, not only because they are often battered and poorly maintained, but because many have auxiliary fuel tanks in the passenger compartment that have been known to rupture and ignite during crashes that might otherwise have been survivable.

-- Anonymous, October 05, 2001


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