[Capt. Tom]

From another fr thread

In fact, the fighting that continued into Sunday is concentrated in about a 30 square mile area near the city of Wana, around the villages of Shin Warsak, Daza Gundai, Kallu Shah, Ghaw Khawa, and Khari Kot.

[Boot Hill]

Thank you Capt. Tom and Dog for your suggestions.

I searched the GEONames database for the place names you suggested, or anything remotely resembling those names. I searched an area two degrees square, or 104 miles on a side, centered on Wana. These are the results.

Shin Warsak -- Already included in list of place names, above.

Daza Gundai -- Most likely "Ghundai", meaning mountain or hill, but still no hits on Daza Ghundai or anything like it.

Kallu Shah -- The only thing close was "Kala Rajan Shah, but it was substantially outside the 30 mile "box" to the NE of Wana, while newspaper reports place Kallu Shah as being in the Azam Warsak area, which is to the SW. So, imo, we have no hit on this one either.

Ghaw Khawa -- A big zero. Nothing on GEONames and nothing on Google.

Khari Kot -- Indeterminate. Google had zero hits, but the GEONames database had four possible hits. The most likely was Karim Kot (14 km, 9 miles, NW at 320° from Wana), but I have a low confidence that I correctly identified the Khari Kot named in the article. However, if you think that's the one, I'll add it to the table.

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO FIND THE PLACE NAMES OF THIS REGION?

There are several reasons.

1. The people of the region speak Pashto, which is written in Arabic script. Translation of place names to English is not done by translating the meaning of the word to its English equivalent, but rather by converting each sound (or phone) to the romantic letters that approximate that phone. In many cases the phones are so complex that conversion requires the use diacritic characters. There is no exact science to making such a conversion, so for any given place name, you may find as many as a dozen different spellings.

2. Population density in this area is very low and averages (easily) below 10 person per square kilometer and in many areas, it goes below 1 person per square kilometer. This means that many populated places have so few residents or are so far in the outback, that they often are overlooked or ignored.

3. The GEONames database is not the problem here. That database is the same database our military relies on for geographic intelligence. It contains nearly 6 million entries of foreign place names covering over 200 categories and types of names. It has, perhaps, the best database search feature available on the internet.

--Boot Hill