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/ 1 February 2006
Saifullah was tired of his exhausting job as a blacksmith in a Pakistani village when a friend suggested he join the jihad, or holy war, against United States troops in Afghanistan. ”If you kill one American soldier, then you can keep his money, his gun, boots and clothes,” he recalled his friend saying.
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/ 31 January 2006
Villagers attacked Taliban rebels who had blockaded a road and were confiscating music cassettes from passing cars in southern Afghanistan, officials said on Tuesday. Two militants and a villager were killed. After seizing and breaking the cassettes, the insurgents informed travellers that music is forbidden by Islam.
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/ 17 January 2006
Afghanistan’s border town of Spin Boldak was in shock on Tuesday after one of the biggest suicide bombings since the Taliban’s fall in 2001 killed 22 people leaving a wrestling match. Monday’s bombing in the town on the Pakistan border struck hours after another suicide blast in the nearby city of Kandahar killed three soldiers and a civilian.
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/ 12 December 2005
An enormous cheer rises into the Bagram sky. In a pink bikini top, miniskirt and red Father Christmas hat, the voluptuous Lilian Garcia has appeared to give thousands of GIs an early Christmas present: the superstars of American wrestling here, in the Afghan desert. Close to 5Â 000 soldiers are packed around a wrestling ring rigged up on the tarmac of the biggest United States base.
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/ 10 December 2005
Taliban insurgents attacked a district government headquarters in violence-plagued southern Afghanistan early on Saturday, sparking a battle that left seven police and five rebels dead, a local police official said. The persistent fighting comes ahead of an expansion of Nato-led peacekeeping operations to the south next year.
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/ 5 December 2005
An attacker blew himself up in a failed assault on coalition forces in volatile southern Afghanistan, while two United States helicopters made emergency landings during combat operations and three American soldiers were injured in a bomb blast, officials said.
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/ 28 November 2005
With a flawless face and marble-smooth arms, a busty blonde mannequin dummy displays a miniskirt in a boutique in Afghanistan’s western city of Herat, where most women wear the bag-like burqa. In the war-scarred capital Kabul, the dummy would hardly attract a second glance.
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/ 8 November 2005
President Hamid Karzai officially opened the most luxurious hotel in destitute Afghanistan on Tuesday, with the five-star Kabul Serena touted as a means to lure investors and dollar-spending tourists. The $36,5-million hotel, opposite the heavily fortified presidential palace, is an almost-total overhaul of the once-famous Kabul Hotel that was badly damaged in the 1992-1996 civil war.
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/ 7 November 2005
A suicide bomber tried on Monday to kill the governor of a volatile southern Afghan province by detonating an explosives-filled vehicle as he was going to work. A man claiming to be a spokesperson for the Taliban movement ousted in 2001 claimed responsibility for the attack on behalf of the hardliners, who are waging an insurgency.
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/ 18 September 2005
Two police officers and four suspected Taliban rebels were killed in clashes hours before key Afghan elections on Sunday, while a United Nations staffer was injured by a rocket strike, officials said. Insurgents fired two rockets early on Sunday at a UN Children’s Fund warehouse in a UN compound on the outskirts of Kabul.
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/ 14 September 2005
Less than a year after winning Afghanistan’s first presidential vote, Hamid Karzai will have to curb the power of warlords and opium kingpins who are likely to be elected to the nation’s new Parliament. Karzai has stamped his authority outside the capital in the past 11 months by taming some of the most powerful former mujahedin commanders, giving them central government positions to weaken their regional power bases.
At least 40 militants and two Afghan soldiers were killed overnight in a raid by United States and Afghan troops on a Taliban hideout in southcentral Afghanistan. The clash took place in Uruzgan, the province where one US soldier was killed on Monday in heavy fighting that also left an Afghan serviceman and 11 insurgents dead.
They don’t wear lycra and some keep their headscarves on while they work out, but the Shafaq Women’s Bodybuilding Club represents a small revolution for women in the conservative western Afghan city of Herat. ”When I come to this club by my own choice I feel I am free and independent,” says 25-year-old Masooda, who works out there.
Afghan intelligence officials have thwarted a plot to assassinate US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and arrested three Pakistanis armed with rocket propelled grenades and assault rifles, a spokesperson for President Hamid Karzai said on Monday. Two senior Afghan officials said the men had confessed to their crimes and said they were in Afghanistan ”to fight jihad.”
A suicide bomb attack on the funeral of a leading cleric killed by suspected Taliban militants left at least 24 people dead in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Wednesday, including one of the country’s top police officers, witnesses and officials said. Many other people were wounded when the blast ripped through a mosque.
It was before dawn and farmer Ghulam Mohaiudin was starting work before the hot sun rose over northern Afghanistan’s Bachgah valley. Then there was a huge bang and he thought the world had ended. He passed out, but minutes later a ”killing pain” in his injured eye and arm brought him back to his senses.
A dam ruptured in southern Afghanistan early on Tuesday, unleashing floods that killed at least six people and washed away hundreds of houses and shops, the provincial governor said. The United States military sent Black Hawk helicopters to help with rescue operations after the Bandi Sultan dam burst.
United States military helicopters airlifted stranded families to safety and aid agencies distributed vital food after devastating floods in Afghanistan left nearly 200 people dead, officials said on Monday. Torrents of melting snow and fierce rains caused rivers to burst their banks in many parts of the poverty-stricken country.
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/ 6 February 2005
Nato rescue workers and hundreds of police were trying to reach the wreckage of an Afghan airliner on Sunday, three days after it collided with a snow-covered mountain in an accident that is believed to have killed all 104 people on board. Nato helicopters spotted the tail and other debris from the Boeing 737-200 on Saturday.
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/ 5 February 2005
Rescuers on Friday found the first pieces of wreckage of a plane carrying 104 passengers that crashed in a snowstorm near the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Thursday. Afghan and international troops spent Friday scouring the mountains near Kabul for signs of the Boeing 737-200.
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/ 4 February 2005
Afghan and Nato forces launched a ground and air search on Friday for an Afghan passenger jet carrying 104 people after it disappeared from radar screens during a snowstorm near the mountain-ringed capital. The Kam Air Boeing 737-200 took off on Thursday afternoon from the western Afghan city of Herat, bound for Kabul.
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/ 28 October 2004
Armed men wearing military-style jackets abducted three foreign United Nations election workers in broad daylight in Kabul on Thursday as vote-counting ended in Afghanistan’s landmark election. A group calling itself the Army of Muslims claimed responsibility, Arabic satellite television station Al-Jazeera reported.
The FBI on Tuesday took over the probe into the weekend bombing of a United States security firm in Kabul as the Afghan capital braced for further potential attacks in the run-up to the country’s landmark presidential election. At least nine people were killed and dozens injured in Sunday’s blast.
When Afghan police burst into the large suburban house in Kabul, they were not expecting to see three men strapped to the ceiling and hanging by their feet. This was supposedly an import business, after all. But as they released the men, and five other captives who were also in the house, officers realised they had stumbled upon a private jail where Afghan prisoners were being locked up and tortured.
Twenty-seven people, including children, were injured on Wednesday in two explosions that rocked a city in eastern Afghanistan, officials said. The bombs hit shortly after 1pm local time in the eastern city of Jalalabad.”There were two explosions, both at security posts,” provincial military corps official Agha Jan said.
The death toll has risen to 50 with more than 100 others critically injured from a fuel tanker that exploded at a gas station in western Afghanistan on Sunday, according to doctors in the western province of Herat. Since the explosion on Sunday afternoon, 15 more people have died due to a lack of proper health facilities.
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/ 25 December 2003
A bomb blast destroyed the wall of a United Nations compound close to the presidential palace in Kabul early on Thursday but there were no casualties, the Afghan security service and international peacekeepers said. The bomb had been placed near the wall of the compound, which is close to the presidential palace.
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/ 10 December 2003
Six children were killed on Friday during an assault by United States forces on a compound in eastern Afghanistan, an American military spokesperson said on Wednesday. It is the second time in a week that civilians have died in action against Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects.
Afghan soldiers swarmed over mountain peaks in an ongoing battle with hardcore Taliban holdouts on Saturday, killing and capturing several enemy fighters. United States fighter planes, meanwhile, launched a second night of bombing in the southern Zabul province.
Afghan soldiers were waging a fierce ground battle with entrenched Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan on Friday after a night of heavy bombing by United States warplanes that left many Taliban fighters dead.
Some one million Afghans have now flocked back to their homeland this year in what is set to be the biggest return of refugees ever seen.
US and British troops uncovered a cache of weapons and explosives during a raid on a tiny farming village in Afghanistan.