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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.
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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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/ 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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/ 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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/ 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.