Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden rendered Usama bin Ladin, was a founder of the pan-Islamic militant organization al-Qaeda. He was a Saudi Arabian until 1994, a member of the wealthy bin Laden family, an ethnic Yemeni Kindite. Bin Laden's father was Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire from Hadhramaut and the founder of the construction company, Saudi Binladin Group, his mother, Alia Ghanem, was from a secular middle-class family based in Syria. He was born in Saudi Arabia and studied at university in the country until 1979, when he joined Mujahideen forces in Pakistan fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, he helped to fund the Mujahideen by funneling arms and fighters from the Arab world into Afghanistan, gained popularity among many Arabs. In 1988, he formed al-Qaeda, he was banished from Saudi Arabia in 1992, shifted his base to Sudan, until U. S. pressure forced him to leave Sudan in 1996. After establishing a new base in Afghanistan, he declared a war against the United States, initiating a series of bombings and related attacks.
Bin Laden was on the American Federal Bureau of Investigation's lists of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives and Most Wanted Terrorists for his involvement in the 1998 U. S. embassy bombings. From 2001 to 2011, bin Laden was a major target of the United States, as the FBI offered a $25 million bounty in their search for him. On May 2, 2011, bin Laden was shot and killed by United States Navy SEALs inside a private residential compound in Abbottabad, where he lived with a local family from Waziristan, during a covert operation conducted by members of the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group and Central Intelligence Agency SAD/SOG operators on the orders of U. S. President Barack Obama. One of the most controversial, influential figures in the 20th and 21st centuries, bin Laden was described as a spiritual leader for al-Qaeda organization, he became one of the most symbolic figures in the Arab world following the Soviet withdrawal. Under his leadership, the al-Qaeda organization was responsible for the mass murder of 2,977 victims of the September 11 attacks in the United States and many other mass-casualty attacks worldwide.
There is no universally accepted standard for transliterating Arabic words and Arabic names into English. The FBI and Central Intelligence Agency, as well as other U. S. governmental agencies, have used either "Usama bin Laden" or "Usama bin Ladin". Less common renderings include "Ussamah bin Ladin" and, in the French-language media, "Oussama ben Laden". Other spellings include "Binladen" or, as used by his family in the West, "Binladin"; the decapitalization of bin is based on the convention of leaving short prepositions and patronymics uncapitalized in surnames. The spellings with o and e come from a Persian-influenced pronunciation used in Afghanistan, where bin Laden spent many years. Osama bin Laden's full name, Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, means "Osama, son of Mohammed, son of Awad, son of Laden". "Mohammed" refers to bin Laden's father Mohammed bin Laden. The Arabic linguistic convention would be to refer to him as "Osama" or "Osama bin Laden", not "bin Laden" alone, as "bin Laden" is a patronymic, not a surname in the Western manner.
According to bin Laden's son Omar bin Laden, the family's hereditary surname is "al-Qahtani", but bin Laden's father, Mohammed bin Laden, never registered the name. Osama bin Laden had assumed the kunyah "Abū'Abdāllāh", his admirers have referred to him by several nicknames, including the "Prince" or "Emir", the "Sheik", the "Jihadist Sheik" or "Sheik al-Mujahid", "Hajj", the "Director". The word usāmah means "lion", earning him the nicknames "Lion" and "Lion Sheik". Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a son of Yemeni Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a millionaire construction magnate with close ties to the Saudi royal family, Mohammed bin Laden's tenth wife, Syrian Hamida al-Attas. In a 1998 interview, bin Laden gave his birth date as March 10, 1957. Mohammed bin Laden divorced Hamida. Mohammed recommended Hamida to an associate. Al-Attas married Hamida in the late 1950s or early 1960s, they are still together; the couple had four children, bin Laden lived in the new household with three half-brothers and one half-sister.
The bin Laden family made $5 billion in the construction industry, of which Osama inherited around $25–30 million. Bin Laden was raised as a devout Sunni Muslim. From 1968 to 1976, he attended the élite secular Al-Thager Model School, he studied economics and business administration at King Abdulaziz University. Some reports suggest he earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979, or a degree in public administration in 1981. One source described him as "hard working". At university, bin Laden's main interest was religion, where he was involved in both "interpreting the Quran and jihad" and charitable work. Other interests included writing poetry.
Honey
Honey is a sweet, viscous food substance produced by bees and some related insects. Bees produce honey from the sugary secretions of plants or from secretions of other insects, by regurgitation, enzymatic activity, water evaporation. Bees store honey in wax structures called a honeycomb; the variety of honey produced by honey bees is the best-known, due to its worldwide commercial production and human consumption. Honey is collected from wild bee colonies, or from hives of domesticated bees, a practice known as beekeeping or apiculture. Honey gets its sweetness from the monosaccharides fructose and glucose, has about the same relative sweetness as sucrose, it has attractive chemical properties for a distinctive flavor when used as a sweetener. Most microorganisms do not grow in honey, so sealed honey does not spoil after thousands of years. Honey provides 46 calories in a serving of one tablespoon. Honey is regarded as safe. Honey use and production have a long and varied history as an ancient activity.
Several cave paintings in Cuevas de la Araña, depict humans foraging for honey at least 8,000 years ago. Honey is produced by bees collecting nectar for use as sugars consumed to support metabolism of muscle activity during foraging or to be stored as a long-term food supply. During foraging, bees access part of the nectar collected to support metabolic activity of flight muscles, with the majority of collected nectar destined for regurgitation and storage as honey. In cold weather or when other food sources are scarce and larval bees use stored honey as food. By contriving for bee swarms to nest in human-made hives, people have been able to semidomesticate the insects and harvest excess honey. In the hive or in a wild nest, the three types of bees are: a single female queen bee a seasonally variable number of male drone bees to fertilize new queens 20,000 to 40,000 female worker beesLeaving the hive, a foraging bee collects sugar-rich flower nectar, sucking it through its proboscis and placing it in its proventriculus, which lies just dorsal to its food stomach.
The honey stomach holds about 40 mg of nectar, or 50% of the bee's unloaded weight, which can require over a thousand flowers and more than an hour to fill. The nectar begins with a water content of 70 to 80%. Salivary enzymes and proteins from the bee's hypopharyngeal gland are added to the nectar to begin breaking down the sugars, raising the water content slightly; the forager bees return to the hive, where they regurgitate and transfer nectar to the hive bees. The hive bees use their honey stomachs to ingest and regurgitate the nectar, forming bubbles between their mandibles until it is digested; the bubbles create a large surface area per volume and a portion of the water is removed through evaporation. Bee digestive enzymes hydrolyze sucrose to a mixture of glucose and fructose, break down other starches and proteins, increasing the acidity; the bees work together as a group with the regurgitation and digestion for as long as 20 minutes, passing the nectar from one bee to the next, until the product reaches the honeycombs in storage quality.
It is placed in honeycomb cells and left unsealed while still high in water content and natural yeasts which, would cause the sugars in the newly formed honey to ferment. Bees are some of the few insects that can generate large amounts of body heat, thus the hive bees regulate the hive temperature, either heating with their bodies or cooling with water evaporation, to maintain a constant temperature in the honey-storage areas around 35 °C; the process continues as hive bees flutter their wings to circulate air and evaporate water from the honey to a content around 18%, raising the sugar concentration beyond the saturation point and preventing fermentation. The bees cap the cells with wax to seal them; as removed from the hive by a beekeeper, honey has a long shelf life and will not ferment if properly sealed. Another source of honey is from a number of wasp species, such as Brachygastra lecheguana and Brachygastra mellifica, which are found in South and Central America; these species are known to produce honey.
Some wasps, such as Polistes versicolor consume honey themselves, alternating between feeding on pollen in the middle of their lifecycles and feeding on honey, which can better provide for their energy needs. Honey is collected from domesticated beehives. On average, a hive will produce about 65 pounds of honey per year. Wild bee nests are sometimes located by following a honeyguide bird. To safely collect honey from a hive, beekeepers pacify the bees using a bee smoker; the smoke triggers a feeding instinct, making them less aggressive and the smoke obscures the pheromones the bees use to communicate. The honeycomb is removed from the hive and the honey may be extracted from that, either by crushing or by using a honey extractor; the honey is usually filtered to remove beeswax and other debris. Before the invention of removable frames, bee colonies were sacrificed to conduct the harvest; the harvester would replace the entire colony the next spring. Since the invention of removable frames, the principles of husbandry led most beekeepers to ensure that their bees have enough stores to survive the winter, either by leaving some honey in the beehive or by providing the colony with a honey substitute such as sugar water or crystalline sugar.
The amount o
Arabic
Arabic is a Central Semitic language that first emerged in Iron Age northwestern Arabia and is now the lingua franca of the Arab world. It is named after the Arabs, a term used to describe peoples living in the area bounded by Mesopotamia in the east and the Anti-Lebanon mountains in the west, in northwestern Arabia, in the Sinai Peninsula. Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage comprising 30 modern varieties, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic, derived from Classical Arabic; as the modern written language, Modern Standard Arabic is taught in schools and universities, is used to varying degrees in workplaces and the media. The two formal varieties are grouped together as Literary Arabic, the official language of 26 states, the liturgical language of the religion of Islam, since the Quran and Hadith were written in Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic, uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties, has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties.
Much of the new vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the post-classical era in modern times. Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, construed as a multitude of dialects of this language; these dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are acquired in families, while the latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschool-aged children; the relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Latin and vernaculars in medieval and early modern Europe. This view though does not take into account the widespread use of Modern Standard Arabic as a medium of audiovisual communication in today's mass media—a function Latin has never performed. During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabic was a major vehicle of culture in Europe in science and philosophy.
As a result, many European languages have borrowed many words from it. Arabic influence in vocabulary, is seen in European languages Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese, Catalan, owing to both the proximity of Christian European and Muslim Arab civilizations and 800 years of Arabic culture and language in the Iberian Peninsula, referred to in Arabic as al-Andalus. Sicilian has about 500 Arabic words as result of Sicily being progressively conquered by Arabs from North Africa, from the mid-9th to mid-10th centuries. Many of these words relate to related activities; the Balkan languages, including Greek and Bulgarian, have acquired a significant number of Arabic words through contact with Ottoman Turkish. Arabic has influenced many languages around the globe throughout its history; some of the most influenced languages are Persian, Spanish, Kashmiri, Bosnian, Bengali, Malay, Indonesian, Punjabi, Assamese, Sindhi and Hausa, some languages in parts of Africa. Conversely, Arabic has borrowed words from other languages, including Greek and Persian in medieval times, contemporary European languages such as English and French in modern times.
Classical Arabic is the liturgical language of 1.8 billion Muslims, Modern Standard Arabic is one of six official languages of the United Nations. All varieties of Arabic combined are spoken by as many as 422 million speakers in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, an abjad script and is written from right to left, although the spoken varieties are sometimes written in ASCII Latin from left to right with no standardized orthography. Arabic is a Central Semitic language related to the Northwest Semitic languages, the Ancient South Arabian languages, various other Semitic languages of Arabia such as Dadanitic; the Semitic languages changed a great deal between Proto-Semitic and the establishment of the Central Semitic languages in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include: The conversion of the suffix-conjugated stative formation into a past tense; the conversion of the prefix-conjugated preterite-tense formation into a present tense.
The elimination of other prefix-conjugated mood/aspect forms in favor of new moods formed by endings attached to the prefix-conjugation forms. The development of an internal passive. There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern Arabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of the northern Hejaz; these features are evidence of common descent from Proto-Arabic. The following features can be reconstructed with confidence for Proto-Arabic: negative particles m *mā.
Circassians
The Circassians known by their endonym Adyghe, are a Northwest Caucasian nation native to Circassia, many of whom were displaced in the course of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the 19th century after the Russo-Circassian War in 1864. In its narrowest sense, the term "Circassian" includes the twelve Adyghe princedoms. However, due to Soviet administrative divisions, Circassians were designated as the following: Adygeans, Cherkessians and Shapsugians, although all the four are the same people residing in different political units. Most Circassians are Sunni Muslim; the Circassians speak the Circassian languages, a Northwest Caucasian dialect continuum with three main dialects and numerous sub-dialects. Many Circassians speak Turkish, English and Hebrew, having been exiled by Russia to lands of the Ottoman Empire, where the majority of them today live. About 800,000 Circassians remain in historical Circassia, others live in the Russian Federation outside these republics and krais; the 2010 Russian Census recorded 718,727 Circassians, of whom 516,826 are Kabardian, 124,835 are other Adyghe in Adygea, 73,184 are Cherkess and 3,882 Shapsug.
The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization estimated in the early 1990s that there are as many as 3.7 million "ethnic Circassian" diaspora outside the titular Circassian republics, that, of these 3.7 million, more than 2 million live in Turkey, 300,000 in the Levant and Mesopotamia and 50,000 in Western Europe and the United States. The Circassians refer to themselves as Adyghe; the name is believed to derive from atté "height" to signify a mountaineer or a highlander, ghéi "sea", signifying "a people dwelling and inhabiting a mountainous country near the sea coast", or "between two seas". The word "Circassians" is an exonym; the Russians referred to all Circassian tribes as Cherkesy, which may be derived from Kerkety, the name of one of the Adyghe tribes native to the northwestern Caucasus. In early Russian sources, the Circassians are referred to as Kasogi, whereas in medieval Arabic sources, Kasogi is written as Jarkas and Jahārkas; the spelling Charkas may be an abbreviation of Persian Chahār-kas.
Though "Jahārkas" was used by Ibn Khaldun and Ali ibn al-Athir, the Persian hypothesis remains uncertain. In the 10th century, Persians and Arabs referred to the Circassians as Kashak, which appears to be a Georgian word derived from Ossetian Kasogi; the Turkic peoples referred to the Circassians as Cherkas, a name which had come into common use by the 13th century. This designation "did not designate the Adygei but rather the people living in southern Ukraine". In contemporary times, Ukraine has a province named Cherkessk, with its provincial capital bearing the same name. With the advent of the Golden Horde in the 13th century, the designation Cherkess "came to refer to the Adygei who remained in the Caucasus, became a generic term for all who lived there"; this in turn created terminology "anomalies", as a result, Cherkes became used alongside other names such as Adygei, Kabardian and Abkhaz. In Medieval Oriental and European texts, "the Adygei people were known by the name Cherkess/Circassians".
The Encylopaedia Islamica adds: "This is because the Cherkess, the Kabardians and the Adygei people share a common language, spoken by the north-western Caucasian people, belongs to the family known as Abkhazian-Adygei". In Persian sources, Charkas/Cherkes is used to refer to the "actual" Circassians of the northwest Caucasus, in some occasions as a general designation for Caucasians who live beyond Derbent. In Russian historiography the term had been used as an exonym for Russian and Cossack people at least until the end of the 18th century, Caucasian Tatar peoples. In Turkey the term nowadays used as a name for all Caucasian nations such as, such as Karachays, different Dagestanian diasporas and others. Despite a common self-designation and a common Russian name, Soviet authorities applied four designations to Circassians: Kabardian, Circassians of Kabardino-Balkaria (Circassians speaking the Kabardian language, one of two indigenous peoples of the republic. Cherkess, Circassians of Karachay-Cherkessia (Circassians speaking the Cherkess, i.e. Circassian, language one of two indigenous peoples of the republic who are Besleney Kabardians.
The name "Cherkess" is the Russian form of "Circassian" and was used for all Circassians before Soviet times. Adyghe or Adygeans, the indigenous population of the Kuban including Adygea and Krasnodar Krai. Shapsug, the indigenous historical inhabitants of Shapsugia, they live in the Tuapse District and the Lazarevsky City District of Sochi, both in Krasnodar Krai and in Adygea. Genetically, the
Tajikistani Civil War
The Tajikistani Civil War known as the Tajik Civil War or the War in Tajikistan, began in May 1992 when regional groups from the Garm and Gorno-Badakhshan regions of Tajikistan rose up against the newly-formed government of President Rahmon Nabiyev, dominated by people from the Khujand and Kulyab regions. The rebel groups were led by a combination of liberal democratic reformers and Islamists, who would organize under the banner of the United Tajik Opposition; the government was supported by Russian border guards. The main zone of conflict was in the country's south; the civil war was at its peak during its first year and dragged on for five years, devastating the country. An estimated 20,000 to 100,000 people were killed by June 1997 and about 10 to 20 percent of the population were internally displaced. On 27 June 1997, Tajikistan president Emomali Rahmon, United Tajik Opposition leader Sayid Abdulloh Nuri and Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General Gerd Merrem signed the "General Agreement on the Establishment of Peace and National Accord in Tajikistan" and the "Moscow Protocol' in Moscow, ending the war.
Tensions began in the spring of 1992 after opposition members took to the streets in demonstrations against the results of the 1991 presidential election. President Rahmon Nabiyev and Speaker of the Supreme Soviet Safarali Kenjayev orchestrated the dispersal of weapons to pro-government militias, while the opposition turned to rebels in Afghanistan for military aid. Fighting broke out in May 1992 between old-guard supporters of the government and a loosely organized opposition composed of ethnic and regional groups from the Garm and Gorno-Badakhshan areas. Ideologically, the opposition included Islamists; the government, on the other hand, was dominated by people from the Leninabadi region, which had made up most of the ruling elite during the entire Soviet period. It was supported by people from the Kulyab region, who had held high posts in the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Soviet times. After many clashes, the Leninabadis were forced to accept a compromise and a new coalition government was formed, incorporating members of the opposition and dominated by them.
On 7 September 1992, Nabiyev was captured by opposition protesters and forced at gunpoint to resign his presidency. Chaos and fighting between the opposing factions reigned outside of the capital Dushanbe. With the aid of the Russian military and Uzbekistan, the Leninabadi-Kulyabi Popular Front forces routed the opposition in early and late 1992; the coalition government in the capital was forced to resign. In December 1992 the Supreme Soviet, where the Leninabadi-Kulyabi faction had held the majority of seats all along and elected a new government under the leadership of Emomali Rahmonov, representing a shift in power from the old power based in Leninabad to the militias from Kulyab, from which Rahmonov came; the height of hostilities occurred from 1992–93 and pitted Kulyabi militias against an array of groups, including militants from the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan and ethnic minority Pamiris from Gorno-Badakhshan. In large part due to the foreign support they received, the Kulyabi militias were able to soundly defeat opposition forces and went on what has been described by Human Rights Watch as an ethnic cleansing campaign against Pamiris and Garmis.
The campaign was concentrated in areas south of the capital and included the murder of prominent individuals, mass killings, the burning of villages and the expulsion of the Pamiri and Garmi population into Afghanistan. The violence was concentrated in Qurghonteppa, the power base of the IRP and home to many Garmis. Tens of thousands were fled to Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the opposition rearmed with the aid of the Jamiat-i-Islami; the group's leader Ahmad. In the war the opposition organized under an umbrella group called the United Tajik Opposition, or UTO. Elements of the UTO in the Tavildara region, became the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, while the leadership of the UTO was opposed to the formation of the organization. Other combatants and armed bands that flourished in this civil chaos reflected the breakdown of central authority rather than loyalty to a political faction. In response to the violence the United Nations Mission of Observers in Tajikistan was deployed. Most fighting in the early part of the war occurred in the southern part of the country, but by 1996 the rebels were battling Russian troops in the capital city of Dushanbe.
Islamic radicals from northern Afghanistan began to fight Russian troops in the region. A UN-sponsored armistice ended the war in 1997; this was in part fostered by the Inter-Tajik Dialogue, a Track II diplomacy initiative in which the main players were brought together by international actors, namely the United States and Russia. The peace agreement eliminated the Leninabad region from power. Presidential elections were held on November 6, 1999; the UTO warned in letters to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and Tajik President Emomali Rahmon on 23 June 1997 that it would not sign the proposed peace agreement on June 27 if prisoner exchanges and the allocation of jobs in the coalition government were not outlined in the agreement. Akbar Turajonzoda, second-in-command of the UTO, repeated this warning on 26 June, but said both sides were negotiating. President Rahmonov, UTO leader Sayid Abdulloh Nuri and Russian President Boris Yeltsin met in th
Soviet–Afghan War
. The Soviet–Afghan War lasted over nine years, from December 1979 to February 1989. Insurgent groups known collectively as the mujahideen, as well as smaller Maoist groups, fought a guerrilla war against the Soviet Army and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan government in the rural countryside; the mujahideen groups were backed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, making it a Cold War proxy war. Between 562,000 and 2,000,000 civilians were killed and millions of Afghans fled the country as refugees to Pakistan and Iran; the war derives from a 1978 coup when Afghanistan's communist party took power, initiating a series of radical modernization reforms throughout the country that were forced and unpopular among the more traditional rural population and the established traditional power structures. The regime's nature of vigorously suppressing opposition, including executing thousands of political prisoners, led to the rise of anti-government armed groups, by April 1979 large parts of the country were in open rebellion.
The ruling party itself experienced deep rivalries, in September 1979 the President, Nur Mohammad Taraki, was murdered under orders of the second-in-command, Hafizullah Amin, which soured relations with the Soviet Union. The Soviet government, under leader Leonid Brezhnev, decided to deploy the 40th Army on December 24, 1979. Arriving in the capital Kabul, they staged a coup, killing president Amin and installing Soviet loyalist Babrak Karmal from a rival faction; the deployment had been variously called an "invasion" or a legitimate supporting intervention on the basis of the Brezhnev Doctrine. In January 1980, foreign ministers from 34 nations of the Islamic Conference adopted a resolution demanding "the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Soviet troops" from Afghanistan; the UN General Assembly passed a resolution protesting the Soviet intervention by a vote of 104 to 18, with 18 abstentions and 12 members of the 152-nation Assembly absent or not participating in the vote. Afghan insurgents began to receive massive amounts of aid and military training in neighboring Pakistan and China, paid for by the United States and Arab monarchies in the Persian Gulf.
As documented by the National Security Archive, "the Central Intelligence Agency played a significant role in asserting U. S. influence in Afghanistan by funding military operations designed to frustrate the Soviet invasion of that country. CIA covert action worked through Pakistani intelligence services to reach Afghan rebel groups." Soviet troops occupied the cities and main arteries of communication, while the mujahideen waged guerrilla war in small groups operating in the 80 percent of the country, outside government and Soviet control exclusively being the rural countryside. The Soviets used their air power to deal harshly with both rebels and civilians, levelling villages to deny safe haven to the mujahideen, destroying vital irrigation ditches, laying millions of land mines; the international community imposed numerous sanctions and embargoes against the Soviet Union, the U. S. led a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics held in Moscow. The boycott and sanctions exacerbated Cold War tensions and enraged the Soviet government, which led a revenge boycott of the 1984 Olympics held in Los Angeles.
The Soviets planned to secure towns and roads, stabilize the government under new leader Karmal, withdraw within six months or a year. But they were met with fierce resistance from the guerillas, were stuck in a bloody war that lasted nine years. By the mid-1980s, the Soviet contingent was increased to 108,800 and fighting increased, but the military and diplomatic cost of the war to the USSR was high. By mid-1987 the Soviet Union, now under reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev, announced it would start withdrawing its forces after meetings with the Afghan government; the final troop withdrawal started on May 15, 1988, ended on February 15, 1989, leaving the government forces alone in the battle against the insurgents, which continued until 1992 when the former Soviet-backed government collapsed. Due to its length, it has sometimes been referred to as the "Soviet Union's Vietnam War" or the "Bear Trap" by the Western media; the Soviets' failure in the war is thought to be a contributing factor to the fall of the Soviet Union.
In 1885, Russian forces seized the disputed oasis at Panjdeh south of the Oxus River from Afghan forces, which became known as the Panjdeh Incident. The border was agreed by the joint Anglo-Russian Afghan Boundary Commission of 1885–87; the Russian interest in the region continued on through the Soviet era, with billions in economic and military aid sent to Afghanistan between 1955 and 1978. After the Saur Revolution in 1978, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was formed on April 27, 1978; the government was one with a pro-farmer socialist agenda. It had close relations with the Soviet Union. On December 5, 1978, a treaty of friendship was signed between Afghanistan. In February 1979, the United States Ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph Dubs, was kidnapped by Setami Milli militants and was killed during an assault carried out by the Afghan police, assisted by Soviet advisers. Dubs' death led to a major deterioration in Afghanistan–United States relations. In Southwestern Asia, drastic changes were taking place concurrent with the upheavals in Afghanistan.
In February 1979, the Iranian Revolution ousted the American-backed Shah from Iran, losing the United States as one of its most powerful allies. The United S
Republic
A republic is a form of government in which the country is considered a “public matter”, not the private concern or property of the rulers. The primary positions of power within a republic are not inherited, but are attained through democracy, oligarchy or autocracy, it is a form of government. In the context of American constitutional law, the definition of republic refers to a form of government in which elected individuals represent the citizen body and exercise power according to the rule of law under a constitution, including separation of powers with an elected head of state, referred to as a constitutional republic or representative democracy; as of 2017, 159 of the world’s 206 sovereign states use the word “republic” as part of their official names – not all of these are republics in the sense of having elected governments, nor is the word “republic” used in the names of all nations with elected governments. While heads of state tend to claim that they rule only by the “consent of the governed”, elections in some countries have been found to be held more for the purpose of “show” than for the actual purpose of in reality providing citizens with any genuine ability to choose their own leaders.
The word republic comes from the Latin term res publica, which means “public thing,” “public matter,” or “public affair” and was used to refer to the state as a whole. The term developed its modern meaning in reference to the constitution of the ancient Roman Republic, lasting from the overthrow of the kings in 509 B. C. to the establishment of the Empire in 27 B. C; this constitution was characterized by a Senate composed of wealthy aristocrats and wielding significant influence. Most a republic is a single sovereign state, but there are sub-sovereign state entities that are referred to as republics, or that have governments that are described as “republican” in nature. For instance, Article IV of the United States Constitution "guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government". In contrast, the former Soviet Union, which described itself as being a group of “Republics” and as a “federal multinational state composed of 15 republics”, was viewed as being a totalitarian form of government and not a genuine republic, since its electoral system was structured so as to automatically guarantee the election of government-sponsored candidates.
The term originates from the Latin translation of Greek word politeia. Cicero, among other Latin writers, translated politeia as res publica and it was in turn translated by Renaissance scholars as "republic"; the term politeia can be translated as form of government, polity, or regime and is therefore not always a word for a specific type of regime as the modern word republic is. One of Plato's major works on political science was titled Politeia and in English it is thus known as The Republic. However, apart from the title, in modern translations of The Republic, alternative translations of politeia are used. However, in Book III of his Politics, Aristotle was the first classical writer to state that the term politeia can be used to refer more to one type of politeia: "When the citizens at large govern for the public good, it is called by the name common to all governments, government". Amongst classical Latin, the term "republic" can be used in a general way to refer to any regime, or in a specific way to refer to governments which work for the public good.
In medieval Northern Italy, a number of city states had signoria based governments. In the late Middle Ages, writers such as Giovanni Villani began writing about the nature of these states and the differences from other types of regime, they used terms such as a free people, to describe the states. The terminology changed in the 15th century as the renewed interest in the writings of Ancient Rome caused writers to prefer using classical terminology. To describe non-monarchical states writers, most Leonardo Bruni, adopted the Latin phrase res publica. While Bruni and Machiavelli used the term to describe the states of Northern Italy, which were not monarchies, the term res publica has a set of interrelated meanings in the original Latin; the term can quite be translated as "public matter". It was most used by Roman writers to refer to the state and government during the period of the Roman Empire. In subsequent centuries, the English word "commonwealth" came to be used as a translation of res publica, its use in English was comparable to how the Romans used the term res publica.
Notably, during The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell the word commonwealth was the most common term to call the new monarchless state, but the word republic was in common use. In Polish the term was translated as rzeczpospolita, although the translation is now only used with respect to Poland. Presently, the term "republic" means a system of government which derives its power from the people rather than from another basis, such as heredity or divine right. While the philosophical terminology developed in classical Greece and Rome, as noted by Aristotle there was a long history of city states with a wide variety of constitutions, not only in Greece but in the Middle East. After the classical period, during the Middle Ages, many free cities developed again, such as Venice; the modern type of "republic" itself is different from any type of state found in the c
Mujahideen of Afghanistan
Chechen Republic of Ichkeria
Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina