Amid dark talk of foreign infiltration in Kandahar after a merciless run of suicide bombings, another, more benign, influence has already breached the city defences: the café latte. In a dusty square clogged with wheezing rickshaws and turbaned men, Kandahar’s first coffee shop has opened.
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/ 7 February 2006
Thirteen people were killed, mostly police, when a suicide bomber loyal to the ousted Taliban regime blew himself up at the police headquarters in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Tuesday, officials said. A man claiming to be a spokesperson for the Taliban militia said the radical Sunni Muslim movement was responsible for the blast.
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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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/ 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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/ 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.
Afghan and United States troops backed by British warplanes pounded a mountain hideout in southern Afghanistan in a day-long battle that left more than 76 Taliban guerrillas dead. The battle was the bloodiest engagement yet in a summer of escalating violence that has dimmed hopes for an early end to the Taliban insurgency.
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.
A powerful car bomb exploded on Friday on a busy road on the outskirts of Kandahar in Afghanistan as a convoy of United States military vehicles was passing, raining debris over a wide area and damaging several cars, police officials said. There was no immediate word on casualties, said General Salim Khan, the deputy police chief for Kandahar province.
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/ 18 February 2003
Barefoot and laughing with glee, Afghan farmer Mohammad Jan squelches through a muddy field of sprouting opium poppies, talking excitedly of his coming harvest.