Nearly 20 years ago, construction of the highway started with optimism and promise. In late 2002, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hired the Louis Berger Group (LBG), a New Jersey-based engineering company, to handle the project; with an end-of-2003 deadline set by the White House, the expected cost was $300 million. But the highway’s path through hard, ambush-ready badlands pushed engineers and hundreds of road workers to the limit, and made them easy targets. In a three-month period in late 2003, a Turkish LBG subcontractor was kidnapped, another was shot, and two Indian road workers were abducted; two American road superintendents survived an attack near Kandahar in which one was shot in the head. A total of 40 people died during Highway 1 construction in 2003, according to Andrew Natsios, a former USAID administrator. “We paid for the highway not just in dollars and cents, but in blood,” he writes in a history of the project. “The … [Read more...] about Highway to Hell: A Trip Down Afghanistan’s Deadliest Road
The girl on the train teaser
America’s Longest War Takes a Deadly New Turn
The rush of incoming aircraft roused Waheeda and her sleeping family. It was long after dark on a cool spring night in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, a Taliban stronghold of fertile valleys and stark mountains that borders Pakistan. The sound of warplanes is a familiar echo across the skies here, but it had never come so close to Waheeda’s mud-brick home. Her father, a village doctor named Nazar Gul, got up to see what was going on when the first bomb struck the family compound, killing five of her cousins. Her father was moving toward the blast site when a second bomb exploded, she says. In an instant, both of her parents and five of her sisters vanished. “It was dark and dusty, and nothing was visible,” the 14-year-old remembers. “I just knew they were all martyred.” … [Read more...] about America’s Longest War Takes a Deadly New Turn
‘Cobra Kai’ Star Tanner Buchanan Signs With ICM Partners
On Cobra Kai, Buchanan plays Robby, the young, heartthrob karate student with a dark past. The critically acclaimed drama series is on course for more than 41M households to have watched Season 3 of the show in its first 28 days. Across all three seasons, some 73M Netflix households have watched an episode, and Season 3 reached No. 1 in 28 countries including the US, UK, Argentina, Greece and Sri Lanka. Netflix has picked the show up for a fourth season. … [Read more...] about ‘Cobra Kai’ Star Tanner Buchanan Signs With ICM Partners
