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/ 26 November 2008
President Hamid Karzai has criticised the US and other foreign countries for creating a ”parallel government” in Afghanistan’s countryside.
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/ 12 November 2008
More than 100 convicted murderers, rapists and kidnappers are on death row in Afghanistan waiting for President Hamid Karzai to sign the orders.
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/ 21 October 2008
An Afghan court on Tuesday overturned the death sentence of a young reporter accused of insulting Islam, but sentenced him to 20 years in jail.
Sixty children were killed in air strikes by United States-led coalition warplanes in western Afghanistan last week, a UN investigation has found.
Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s President, escalated tensions with neighbouring Pakistan on Sunday by threatening to send troops across the border.
Syed Ali was playing on the roof of his mud-brick house when the killers came for Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai last week. Karzai survived the attack on Kabul’s broad parade ground. Ten-year-old Syed Ali, a kilometre away watching his mother cleaning almond shells to supplement the family’s winter fuel, died, with two others, when he was hit by a stray bullet.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai escaped unhurt after an assassination attempt by Taliban fighters with guns and rockets during an official celebration in the capital, Kabul, on Sunday. Government ministers along with leaders of other political factions were seen ducking for cover after gunfire sounded at the celebration to mark the 16th anniversary of fall of the Afghan communist government.
The new United Nations envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, arrived in Kabul on Friday with a pledge to improve coordination with President Hamid Karzai’s government. ”The Afghan government has asked for that for a very long time and we have to respond in a better way than we have managed so far,” said Eide.
Pakistan’s new prime minister was sworn in by President Pervez Musharraf on Tuesday as two senior United States envoys arrived for talks aimed at shoring up Islamabad’s role in the ”war on terror”.
United States-led coalition troops killed three men, two children and a woman, in a raid in south-eastern Afghanistan, the district chief and village residents said on Wednesday. The issue of civilian casualties is a sensitive one as it undermines public support for the presence of foreign troops.
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/ 26 February 2008
The United Nations on Monday warned that it no longer has enough money to keep global malnutrition at bay this year in the face of a dramatic upward surge in world commodity prices, which have created a ”new face of hunger”. ”We will have a problem in coming months,” said Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN’s World Food Programme.
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/ 17 February 2008
A suicide bomber killed more than 80 people at a picnic spot in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar on Sunday in the most deadly attack since the Taliban were ousted in 2001, the government said. The attack will add urgency to a debate about how the United States and Afghanistan’s other allies can help stem militant violence and promote stability.
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/ 16 February 2008
Two-thirds of the Taliban-led insurgents in Afghanistan can be persuaded to abandon violence, according to a British aid worker expelled from the country for opening talks with some of those allied to the militant group. Michael Semple said he was confident that most Taliban-linked insurgents could be absorbed into Afghanistan’s reconciliation process.
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/ 12 February 2008
Pakistani security forces wounded and captured a prominent Taliban commander on Monday near the border area with Afghanistan. Mullah Mansour Dadullah took over as commander of Taliban forces in the southern Afghan province of Helmand after his brother, Mullah Dadullah, was killed by British forces in May.
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/ 27 December 2007
United Nations officials were on Wednesday night working to prevent the expulsion from Afghanistan of two senior Western diplomats who have been accused of holding illegal talks with Taliban leaders in the British theatre of operations in the southern province of Helmand.
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/ 22 November 2007
The Taliban has a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan and the country is in serious danger of falling into Taliban hands, according to a report by an independent think tank with long experience in the area. There is no sign of any move within Nato to send reinforcements to Afghanistan.
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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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/ 24 September 2007
Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on Sunday there was ”no war in the offing” between his country and the United States. He told the CBS programme 60 Minutes: ”It’s wrong to think that Iran and the US are walking toward war. Who says so? Why should we go to war?”
Taliban insurgents will release 19 South Korean Christian volunteers they have been holding for more than a month in Afghanistan, South Korea’s presidential Blue House said on Tuesday. The announcement followed the resumption of negotiations that had been on hold for two weeks.
The United Kingdom’s drug policy in Afghanistan’s Helmand province lay in tatters on Monday as the United Nations declared a ”frightening” explosion in opium production across the country, led by Taliban-backed farmers in the volatile south. Opium production soared by 34% to 8 200 tonnes.