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A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s I received a tremendous amount of help and support in researching and writing this book. Thanks first of all to my wife, Feyza, who accompanied me on several legs of my expeditions in Afghanistan and surrounding regions. Thanks also to my parents Gareth and Donna, who proofed this work for me and encouraged me to follow my interests in Central Asia in college and graduate school. I would not be who I am today without them. I also owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Uli Schamilogu, my former advisor and friend who patiently taught me Central Asian Turkic-Mongol tribal history at Indiana University and the University of Wisconsin. Most important, I would like to send my thanks to Colonel Mark Shankle and his team at the Joint Information Operations Warfare Command at Lackland Air Base, Texas, for inspiring me to write this book as a field manual. It was an honor to work with Colonel Shankle and his dedicated team on this project. I received additional support and hospitality from Colonel Arthur Tulac and his Information Operations team at NATO headquarters in Kabul in the summer of 2009. Thanks are also due to my colleague at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Avery Plaw, who proofed this work and added his helpful comments. Invaluable assistance was also rendered by Tim Paicopolos in providing proofing and editing. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the legendary CIA field operative, terrorism analyst, and author, Dr. Marc Sageman, for his eyewitness insights into the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s. Sageman’s accounts of his role in training and funding the mujahideen during the Cold War proved to be invaluable. And I would like to express my gratitude to Bart Decker from the Air Force’s elite 23rd Special Tactics Squadron based at Hurlburt Airfield, Florida. Master Sergeant Decker, who fought alongside the horsemounted Northern Alliance warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum in 2001’s Operation Enduring Freedom, proved to be an unparalleled eyewitness source of information on this remarkable campaign. This book could not have been completed without the help of numerous people in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I would like to thank Northern 248 Acknowledgments Alliance commander General Abdul Rashid Dostum and his son Batur and brother Abdul Kadir for their hospitality in Mazar i Sharif and Sheberghan . Thanks also to Ahmed Khan, the Uzbek mujahideen leader of Tash Kurgan, for spending endless hours explaining the role of the Uzbeks in the anti-Soviet war. I am also grateful to the Turkmen spiritual leader Serecettin Mahdum, who spent the summer of 2005 patiently guiding me across northern Afghanistan from the Dar y Suf Valley to the Panjsher Valley. And I would like to thank Tugay Tuncer from the Turkish diplomatic service for his introductions to Dostum and other Afghan leaders. I would have never grasped the nuances of Afghan ethnicity were it not for the patient help of parliament member Faizullah Zeki, so tashakor to him as well. In addition, I would like to thank Ahmad Rafay Alam and his wife Aysha for letting me stay with them in Pakistan in 2010. I also owe a great debt to my editor at University of Pennsylvania Press, Bill Finan, for his hard work in transforming my earlier manual for the military into a book. And last, thanks to my father-in-law and mother-in-law, Feruzan and Kemal Altindag, for providing me with a quiet place in their home on the coast of Turkey to write up the civilian version of this book. ...

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