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/ 31 October 2007
Afghan and Nato forces have killed 50 Taliban rebels in three days of clashes and surrounded 200 others who occupied civilian homes in southern Afghanistan, police said on Wednesday. Civilians were fleeing on motorbikes, tractors, cars and animals piled with their belongings amid the fighting, provincial police chief Sayed Aqa Saqib said.
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/ 28 October 2007
United States-led coalition and Afghan troops killed about 80 Taliban fighters in a six-hour battle following an ambush in southern Afghanistan, the US military said on Sunday. Taliban fighters opened fire on Saturday with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades on the joint coalition and Afghan army patrol from a trench near Musa Qala in Helmand province.
A suicide bomber killed 12 Afghan police on a bus in Kabul on Tuesday, a police official said, the second such attack in the capital in four days. ”The report we have indicates that so far 12 police have been killed and 15 wounded,” said the official who declined to be named.
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/ 30 September 2007
A suicide bomber killed 28 Afghan troops and two civilians on Saturday in an attack on an army bus in Kabul, the Afghan president said. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, the deadliest in the Afghan capital since the hard-line Islamist movement was ousted from power for harbouring al-Qaeda leaders.
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/ 29 September 2007
A bomb attack on a bus carrying Afghan army troops killed at least 27 people on Saturday in the capital, a witness said. Police at the scene initially said it was a suicide bomb attack, but one official said it could have been caused by a large land mine. Residents helped police pick up pieces of flesh and put them into plastic bags.
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/ 26 September 2007
Nato and United States-led troops backed up by warplanes said on Wednesday they had killed nearly 170 Taliban in two major battles in southern Afghanistan, while a US-led coalition soldier also died. The heaviest of the fighting with the Islamic insurgents erupted on Tuesday in the volatile southern province of Helmand.
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/ 13 September 2007
Major clashes between Taliban and security forces in Afghanistan left 56 rebels dead while an Afghan soldier and a Bangladeshi aid worker were also reported killed, officials said on Thursday. The deadliest of the incidents kicked off with an ambush on Afghan and coalition troops who called in air support.
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/ 10 September 2007
At least 26 people, many of them civilians, were killed on Monday in two simultaneous suicide attacks in Afghanistan’s southern province of Helmand, a provincial police official said. About 45 people were also wounded in the twin blasts that targeted a group of police in a shopping area of the Girishk district of the province.
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/ 1 September 2007
South Korea paid Afghanistan’s Taliban more than -million to release 19 missionaries they were holding hostage, a senior insurgent leader said on Saturday, vowing to use the funds to buy arms and mount suicide attacks. The freed hostages flew out of Afghanistan on Friday to Dubai en route for South Korea.
Nineteen newly freed South Korean hostages were set to fly out of the Afghan capital on Friday after a six-week kidnap drama, sources close to the arrangements said, after a deal critics fear could spur more abductions. Taliban insurgents freed the remaining seven South Korean Christian volunteers late on Thursday.
The Taliban have handed four South Korean hostages to Afghan tribal elders and was to hand over the remaining three later on Thursday, a rebel negotiator said. Twelve other hostages were released in three separate groups on Wednesday after negotiations between the insurgents and South Korean negotiators.
A wanted Taliban insurgent leader in Afghanistan, Mullah Brother, was killed on Thursday in a United States-led raid in the southern province of Helmand, the Afghan Defence Ministry said, citing ground commanders. Brother served as a top military commander for the Taliban government until its removal from power in 2001.
More than 100 suspected insurgents were killed in a battle with United States-led troops in southern Afghanistan, the US military said on Wednesday. The battle erupted after a convoy of Afghan and US coalition forces came under attack in the Shah Wali Kot district in Kandahar province, it said in a statement.
Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan freed two South Korean women hostages on Monday, officials in Seoul said, and they have been handed over to the Red Crescent. Reuters witnesses said the two women arrived in the village of Arzoo, near the city of Ghazni, in a saloon car driven by two tribal elders.
A wave of Taliban attacks across Afghanistan killed 29 people, including four international soldiers and nearly two dozen militants, military officials said on Sunday. The violence came after a week of intense fighting as the Taliban’s al-Qaeda-backed insurgency, launched nearly six years ago, intensified into the summer.
Two Taliban negotiators said on Saturday they were ”optimistic” about talks to release their 21 South Korean hostages but insisted that some jailed rebels must be freed first. The Afghan government has consistently rejected the demand since the group of Christian aid workers was captured in the southern province of Ghazni more than three weeks ago.
Afghan forces have killed 21 Taliban insurgents in the southern province of Zabul, a provincial official said on Monday. ”We received intelligence that a sizeable group of Taliban militants were gathered in the Shah Joy district of Zabul in an attempt to block the Kabul-Kandahar highway, and to launch attacks on Afghan and foreign forces,” said provincial deputy governor Gulab Shah Alikhil.
Two Afghan lawmakers — one of them a former Taliban member — and several influential elders have joined negotiations with the hard-line militia to step up pressure for the release of 22 South Korean hostages, an official said on Saturday. The Taliban has demanded the release of insurgent prisoners in exchange for the hostages.
United States-led troops, backed by air power, killed more than 50 insurgents in a battle in Afghanistan’s southern province of Helmand, the US military said on Thursday. There were no casualties among coalition troops in the 12-hour battle with Taliban militants, which finished early on Thursday, it said in a statement.
Former Afghan king Mohammad Zahir Shah, whose 40-year reign coincided with one of the most peaceful periods in the country’s recent history, died on July 23, aged 92. President Hamid Karzai declared three days of mourning and ordered flags to be flown at half mast for the man heralded as ”father of the nation”.
Afghanistan’s Taliban movement said on Saturday it had killed the second German hostage after the group’s demands were ignored, a spokesperson for the militant group said. The couple were shot dead in Ghazni province which lies to the south-west of the capital, Kabul.
Floods in eastern Afghanistan triggered by unseasonal downpours have left at least 56 people dead with about 100 plucked to safety overnight with the help of Nato helicopters, officials said on Thursday. In many provinces there was also damage to homes, agricultural land, roads, wells and livestock.
An air strike by foreign-led forces killed 25 civilians, including 12 members of a family, and 20 Taliban fighters in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province, the provincial police chief said on Friday. Hussien Andiwal said the raid took place on Thursday night as part of an operation against Taliban fighters by foreign forces and Afghan troops.
At least seven children have been killed in a United States-led coalition air strike in a religious school in Afghanistan, the coalition said on Monday, amid rising anger over civilian deaths from foreign military operations. More than 120 civilians have been killed by foreign troops in Afghanistan in recent months.
Golfers who tee-off at the Kabul Golf Course don’t have to worry about their balls landing in the traditional golf hazards of sand bunkers and ponds. The Afghan capital’s only golf course is one giant hazard. From tee to green, there is not a patch of grass; only weeds, rocks, baked-hard mud and the odd strand of barbed wire.
A powerful bomb destroyed a police bus in the heart of the Afghan capital on Sunday, killing more than 35 people, police said, as the extremist Taliban movement claimed responsibility. It was the deadliest attack of its kind in Afghanistan since the Taliban regime was toppled in late 2001.
Afghanistan’s largest cellphone company is only four years’ old and has just made its first annual profit, but there are still teething problems. Its field staff have to be wary of kidnappings and landmines, a sub-contractor was recently beheaded, and Taliban militia have reportedly threatened to destroy its communications towers.
About 60 fleeing Taliban guerrillas were confirmed dead after their boat sank in a river in southern Afghanistan, the Defence Ministry said on Sunday. ”According to reports we received, all of them on board were Taliban and were killed,” Defence Ministry spokesperson General Mohammad Zahir Azimi told reporters.
More than 30 rebel fighters were killed in southern Afghanistan early on Sunday, a police chief said, as the Nato force announced it had killed "a significant number" of Taliban leaders. The rebels were killed in a military sweep involving foreign forces in the southern province of Ghazni, provincial police commander Alishah Ahmadzai said.
Nearly 70 Taliban militants were killed in an ambush by United States-led forces and Afghan soldiers in eastern Afghanistan, a military commander said on Saturday. The rebels were killed late on Friday in Paktia province near the border with Pakistan, Afghan army General Sami-Ul Haq Badar said. ”We set an ambush, attacked them and killed 67 Taliban.”
A Nato air strike on Monday night killed at least 60 suspected Taliban, including their three commanders, and wounded dozens more in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, police said on Tuesday. Violence has surged in Afghanistan in recent weeks after the traditional winter lull.
The Taliban’s top operational commander, Mullah Dadullah, has been killed in a clash in southern Afghanistan, security officials said on Sunday. ”Mullah Dadullah has been killed and his body is in Kandahar,” said Saeed Ansari, spokesperson for the intelligence department.