An air strike by Western forces killed 21 civilians, including women and children, in Afghanistan, a provincial governor said on Wednesday, the latest in a string of civilian casualties that has riled Afghans. The incident brings to nearly 90 the number of civilian deaths blamed by Afghan officials on Western troops in the past two weeks.
United States-led coalition troops killed more than 130 Taliban fighters in Afghanistan over the past several days, the coalition said on Monday, the heaviest reported rebel losses this year amid rising violence in the country. Backed by air support, the Taliban were killed in two separate battles in the western province of Herat, the US military said in a statement.
Two Canadian soldiers and 35 Taliban militants were killed in the latest violence to rock insurgency-hit southern Afghanistan, officials said on Thursday. The Islamist Taliban fighters were killed late on Wednesday in fierce fighting with Afghan and United States-led troops in troubled Zabul province.
Heavy floods in 19 provinces of Afghanistan left at least 91 people dead and 49 other injured in the past five days, while avalanches in northern Afghanistan have claimed the lives of 23 people, officials said on Wednesday. The most heavily affected regions were the northern Parwan and western Herat province.
Afghan-led forces killed 69 Taliban in a major operation against rebel strongholds in southern Afghanistan, while seven police also died, the Defence Ministry said Friday. Thursday’s push through part of the southern province of Helmand was the first ”where foreign forces have not participated”, Defence Ministry spokesperson Mohammad Zahir Azimi said.
A suicide attacker rammed an explosives-filled car into a United States embassy convoy in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Monday, wounding five embassy staff and guards and at least three passers-by, officials said. The fiery attack was the first suicide bombing inside Kabul this year after several deadly blasts last year blamed on Taliban insurgents.
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/ 27 February 2007
United States Vice-President Dick Cheney said the suicide bombing at the gate of a US air base he was visiting in Afghanistan on Tuesday made a "loud boom" and drove him briefly into a bomb shelter. But Cheney said it was "never an option" to scrap plans to go on to the Afghan capital, Kabul, where he later held talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
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/ 22 February 2007
The Taliban has deployed 6Â 000 fighters in preparation for a spring offensive against government and foreign forces in Afghanistan, said the military leader of the Islamic milita that once ruled the country. ”The attack is imminent,” Mullah Dadullah said in an interview with al-Jazeera television.
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/ 18 February 2007
Eight United States soldiers were killed and 14 injured when their helicopter crashed in a mountainous, snow-covered area of southern Afghanistan, the US military said on Sunday. The twin-rotor Ch-47 Chinook crashed a few hours before dawn after the pilot suddenly lost power and control of the aircraft.
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/ 16 February 2007
The Taliban has deployed 10 000 fighters for a spring offensive of ”bloody attacks” against foreign troops in Afghanistan, a rebel commander said on Friday. More than 4 000 people, a quarter of them civilians, were killed in fighting last year, the most violent year since the Taliban were ousted in 2001. Nato commanders warn this year could be just as bad or worse.
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/ 14 February 2007
Taliban fighters used children as human shields to flee heavy fighting this week during an operation by foreign and Afghan forces to clear rebels from around a key hydroelectric dam, Nato said on Wednesday. The Taliban have used human shields before, but never children, local residents say.
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/ 7 February 2007
More than 1 000 villagers have fled a southern Afghan town as Taliban fighters dig in to repel Nato efforts to drive them out, residents and officials said on Wednesday. Helmand provincial governor Haji Assadullah Wafa told Reuters that a military operation would soon be launched to recapture Musa Qala.
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/ 7 February 2007
The southern Afghan province of Helmand, where the Taliban have taken control of a district capital for several days, is at the heart of a drug empire that supplies Europe with most of its opium. And the growing cultivation of opium poppies mirrors the rise in the Taliban-led insurgency that is funded by the narco-traffic.
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/ 30 January 2007
In the Afghan city of Herat, where there are no cinemas, Rahima, Rita, Mariam and Monirah are women of ill repute. But in following their dreams to become actresses in a country where just five years ago film and theatre were banned under the Taliban government, the women are mavericks trying to bring culture to their war-ravaged homeland.
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/ 26 January 2007
A senior Taliban leader may have been killed along with his deputies by a Nato air strike in Afghanistan, the alliance said. The incident happened on Thursday in an area of southern Helmand province, part of the main bastion of the resurgent Taliban, Nato said in a statement late on Thursday.
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/ 11 January 2007
Nato-led troops killed up to 150 insurgents in a ground and air operation in south-eastern Afghanistan after the insurgents infiltrated into Afghanistan from neighbouring Pakistan. Afghan anger over the infiltration of Taliban militants from Pakistan has seriously soured relations between the neighbours, both important United States allies in the war on terrorism.
Hainuallah’s days in a destitute border village in Pakistan all seemed exactly the same: a trip to the madrasa (religious school), the return home, dinner, and then creeping into bed. Then one day, a preacher told him about a way out of the boredom — a sure ticket to a paradise filled with milk and honey running under fruit-laden trees.
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/ 18 November 2006
Heavy flooding has killed at least 52 people in north-western Afghanistan and left scores more missing this week, and Nato airlifted emergency aid on Saturday, officials said. Governor of badly hit Badghis province Mohammad Nasim Tokhi said at least 50 people were still missing and more than 1Â 000 people were homeless.
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/ 17 November 2006
Flash floods caused by heavy rains have killed nearly 50 people in western Afghanistan, with 60 more missing, the Afghan Health Ministry said on Friday. Afghanistan, especially the west and south, has been in the grip of drought but heavy rains started falling in several areas in the past week.
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/ 13 November 2006
Five years ago today the Taliban vanished from Kabul and a liberated city exploded with joy. As the turbaned Islamists scurried, whooping residents rushed on to the streets. Men queued to have their beards shaved, some women removed their burkas and Radio Kabul played music for the first time in years.
United States-led coalition and Afghan troops have killed 49 Taliban insurgents in two separate battles in southern Afghanistan, the defence ministry said on Monday. This year’s fighting is the worst since coalition forces ousted the hard-line Taliban government in late 2001. The latest battles were in Deh Rawud district of rugged Uruzgan province over the past two days, a ministry statement said.
Nato will assume responsibility for security across the whole of Afghanistan from Thursday when it takes command in the east from United States-led coalition forces, a senior Nato official said on Tuesday. Nato’s International Security Assistance Force already commands forces in the north, west and south, as well as in the capital, Kabul.
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/ 30 September 2006
A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded area of the Afghan capital on Saturday, killing at least 12 people and wounding scores in the latest in a series of such attacks on Kabul. It was not immediately clear who carried out the morning rush-hour attack, but similar strikes have been claimed by the extremist Taliban movement waging a deadly insurgency.
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/ 26 September 2006
Eighteen people were killed and 17 others were injured in a suicide attack in the southern province of Helmand on Tuesday, officials said. The suicide attacker targetted Afghan Muslims gathered at an office to register themselves for the Haj pilgrimage.
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/ 10 September 2006
A suicide bomber assassinated an Afghan provincial governor on Sunday, as Nato said it killed almost 100 more Taliban fighters in its biggest offensive against the resurgent Islamist group. Governor Hakim Taniwal, a former mines minister who once lectured in an Australian university, is the first provincial chief killed since the Taliban fell five years ago.
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/ 10 September 2006
President Hamid Karzai Sunday formally opened a $25-million Coca-Cola bottling plant, one of the most significant investments in Afghanistan since the ousting of the Taliban five years ago. Karzai said it was an endorsement of the government’s efforts to push ahead with reconstruction of the war-damaged country.
A suspected suicide bomber killed at least 17 people and wounded almost 50 in a crowded bazaar in southern Afghanistan on Monday, the latest attack in a surge of violence in the Taliban heartland. Several children were among those killed or hurt in the blast in Lashkar Gah, capital of the country’s prime drug-growing province of Helmand.
Seven suspected al-Qaeda members were killed in a clash in Afghanistan on Thursday, the United States military said, although Afghan officials said those killed were civilians. The US and Afghan troops were on an operation to capture ”a known al-Qaeda facilitator” linked to attacks on Afghan and coalition troops, the US military said.
More than 70 Taliban guerrillas have been killed in fighting with Nato and Afghan forces in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, a provincial police official said on Sunday. The battle erupted late on Saturday after hundreds of Taliban attacked the district government headquarters.
A United States-led coalition warplane mistakenly dropped a bomb on an Afghan police convoy in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, killing 12 police officers, a police commander said. The coalition confirmed "an event did happen" and said it was collecting details.
A suicide car-bomb attack aimed at a convoy of Nato troops in southern Afghanistan killed at least 20 civilians on Thursday, a provincial police chief said. The attack in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar province occurred south-west of its provincial capital near where two separate roadside bombs killed a Canadian soldier and injured four others earlier in the day.
A bomb in a police car killed at least eight Afghans on Monday as Nato forces took control of security in southern Afghanistan to begin one of the biggest ground operations in the alliance’s history. The blast occurred in the eastern city of Jalalabad, far from the transfer-of-command ceremony on a base outside the southern city of Kandahar.