Afghanistan News Archives

Australian News.Net Saturday 31st May, 2008 Afghan President Hamid Karzai has expressed anxiety about Pakistan's deal with Taliban militants and warned that Kabul will 'not only be upset but extremely angry' if ...

Last British resident in Guantanamo Bay begs Gordon Brown to help set him free By Daily Mail Reporter Last updated at 6:56 AM on 30th May 2008 Guantanamo Bay A British resident detained in Guantanamo Bay has ...

The following is a transcript of President Bush's weekly radio address: THE PRESIDENT: Good morning.

From correspondents in Berlin, Germany, 08:00 PM IST The US military authorities in Afghanistan have released a German of Afghan origin detained at a military airbase near Kabul five months ago, the German ...

Norwegian troops in Afghanistan are being removed from front-line fighting against Taliban insurgents with a new assignment of training Afghan forces.

The number of Army suicides increased again last year, amid the most violent year yet in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

A US soldier shakes hands with Afghan policemen, who finished their training during a ceremony in Herat yesterday.

Sayed Shah commands a lonely Afghan police checkpoint on the road to Kandahar and in his pocket he carries a laminated card of appreciation from U.S. Special Forces for his help in hunting down straggling ...

The government of Afghanistan is asking international donors for 4 billion dollars in an effort to wean its farmers off opium.

An Afghan detainee at Guantanamo Bay was the alleged victim of an abusive tactic meant to decrease his resistance to interrogation, a Pentagon-appointed defence attorney said Wednesday in a motion to dismiss ...

A soldier with 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, died Wednesday in Afghanistan.

Mr. Browne said Britain supported any moves that would encourage militants to put down their weapons and stop violence, and said Pakistan and Afghanistan needed to work together on problems with their border, ...

The number of Army suicides increased again last year, amid the most violent year yet in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Two defense officials said Thursday that 108 troops committed suicide in 2007, six more than the previous year. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the full report on the deaths wasn't being released until later Thursday.

About a quarter of the deaths occurred in Iraq.

The overall toll was the highest in many years, and it was unclear when, if ever, it was previously that high. Immediately available Army records go back only to 1990 and the figure then was lower - at 102 - for that year as well as 1991.

The Pentagon announced a 21-year-old soldier from Santa Rosa was killed in Afghanistan.

Army Spc. Christopher Gathercole died Monday after being injured by small arms fire during combat in Ghazni. He had been assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, based at Fort Lewis, Washington.

According to special-operations command, Gathercole was a light machine gunner. He had earned a combat infantryman badge, a parachutist badge and the Ranger Tab, Army officials said.

Pakistan has signed a peace deal with a small Taliban militant group in a region near the Afghan border, an official said Wednesday, the latest in a series of accords sought by the country's new government as it tries to end extremist violence.

The deal includes a pledge from the militants led by Umar Khalid not to target security and government officials, said Syed Ahmad, a deputy administrator in the Mohmand tribal region.

Both sides also swapped prisoners, he said. He declined to give details about the number of prisoners exchanged, but said the militants had been holding some government officials.

A suicide car bomber hit a convoy of international soldiers in Kabul on Thursday, killing three Afghans caught in the blast, police said.

Conservative MP Laurie Hawn presents a Canadian flag, signed by Edmonton schoolchildren, to Col.

A passenger truck ran off the road in a remote mountainous region of Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing 15 people and wounding 56, an official said. Three suicide bomb attacks around the country killed one person.

The truck ran off the road in the northeastern province of Badakhshan. President Hamid Karzai ordered Afghan army helicopters to help evacuate the wounded to better hospitals in Kabul, the capital, but bad weather was hindering that effort, said Abdul Mamoon Jalali, the provincial health director.

The State Department has begun to identify diplomats who could be forced to serve in Iraq next year unless enough volunteers come forward to fill about 300 positions, The Associated Press has learned.

A department-wide notice issued Tuesday says officials have looked through the files of all foreign service officers who will be applying or 'bidding' for new jobs in 2009 and compiled a roster of candidates who are 'particularly well-qualified' to work at the American Embassy in Baghdad and in outlying provinces.

Journalist Fareed Zakaria will host CNN's new weekly show on foreign affairs. Former British prime minister Tony Blair will be the first guest on a new weekly CNN talk show devoted to international issues.

The U.S. should rethink its approach in Pakistan, including a multimillion dollar program aimed at training and equipping tribal militants, unless Islmabad does more to keep terrorists from crossing the Afghan border, a top Democrat said Tuesday.

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, told reporters after a three-day trip to the region that U.S. officials have little confidence that pieces of the Pakistan government, particularly its army, are working actively to stop the flow of Taliban fighters and weapons into Afghanistan. In some cases, these groups might even be providing terrorists' support, he said.

The U.S. is making 'a big and continual push' to capture or kill al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, but his demise won't end the organization's menace, CIA Director Michael Hayden said Tuesday in an Associated Press interview. The CIA is equally interested in those jockeying to replace bin Laden in what he predicted will be a 'succession crisis.'

'It will be really interesting to see how that plays out. The organization is a lot more networked than it is ruthlessly hierarchical,' Hayden said of the group behind the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. 'How do you pick the next overall leader?'

Canadian Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier has resigned after it emerged he had left classified documents in the apartment of a former girlfriend with suspected ties to organised crime.

An Afghan official says a roadside bomb hit a bus in western Afghanistan, killing eight civilians.

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh said yesterday: 'It would now be too difficult to get rid of me' enlarge His surroundings are grim and forbidding, a Kabul prison thronged with desperate humanity.

The International Federation of Journalists is deeply concerned and disturbed by the further delay in deciding the journalist Sayed Parvez Kambakhsh's appeal against a death sentence for the alleged crime of ...

Monday 26 May 2008, by ... ... Hundreds of University students in northern Mazar-e Sharif city staged a protest rally against America over the US soldier's firing at a holy Koran for his practice shooting.

The Taliban will fight on till the last foreign soldier is driven out of Afghanistan, but their door is always open to talks with other Afghan opposition groups, the Islamist movement said on Monday.

KABUL * Afghanistan's parliament has started naming stay-away lawmakers, with a brother of President Hamid Karzai first on the list, in a bid to stop no-shows hobbling its work, an official said yesterday.

From correspondents in Islamabad, Pakistan, 03:01 PM IST Two policemen and a civilian were killed Saturday in two separate bomb attacks in restive north-west Pakistan, officials said.

Five Taliban militants were killed in a mine explosion in southern Afghanistan while four police officers were wounded and two Taliban militants were detained in a clash, officials said Saturday.

You can go see Indiana Jones and the temple of whatever if you like, but it's probably not going to be as good as the Bactrian Gold and the Secret of Tillya Tepe.

The former is at any multiplex. The latter is only at the National Gallery of Art.

It's one of those ripping good yarns of yesteryear, the kind you used to see on cliffhanger serials before the main feature. This one is set in a dusty corner of Afghanistan. It's about ancient art, sealed rooms, looters, gravediggers, the Russians, the French, the Taliban, an invasion or three, civil war, the Silk Road, the Dragon Master and 22,607 pieces of gold and ivory and lapis and turquoise. There's a princess in Tomb I, a surprising role played by pink Chinese toilet paper and six mysterious safes in a sealed underground vault at the presidential compound.

PARIS: France on Saturday hosts a conference of some 40 humanitarian organisations who hope to shift the world's focus from fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan to helping the country rebuild.

By NOOR KHAN The Associated Press Sunday, May 25, 2008; 6:56 AM KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- A suicide bomber hit a Canadian military convoy in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, killing one boy, while a U.S.-led ...

Canada's government violated the constitution when it gave American officials the results of interviews conducted with a Canadian detainee at the Guantanamo Bay prison, the nation's top court said Friday.

Hundreds of NATO soldiers got a dash of Canadian music and humour Friday night before a Taliban rocket attack forced a troupe of entertainers to temporarily douse the lights at Kandahar Airfield.

The U.S.-led coalition says several insurgents have been killed and six others detained during an operation in southern Afghanistan.

The leader of the Pakistani Taliban vowed on Saturday to carry on fighting NATO and U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan regardless of negotiations for a peace deal with the government of Pakistan.

Afghan officials expressed outrage Saturday at a decision by the U.S. military not to charge U.S. Marines involved in a shooting spree that left 19 Afghan civilians dead in 2007.

Lt. Gen. Samuel Helland, the commander of U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Central Command, made the decision not to bring charges after reviewing the findings of a special tribunal that heard more than three weeks of testimony in January at Camp Lejuene.

'I am very angry,' said Kubra Aman, a senator from Nangarhar. 'This is too much. They are killing people. First, they say it is a mistake, and after that they let them go without charges.'

In 1988, Omar Khan Masoudi huddled with other museum curators in Afghanistan to make a critical decision _ how to protect some of the nation's oldest and most prized artifacts.

A remote-control bomb exploded next to a passing Afghan National Army convoy Thursday, killing one soldiers and wounding another, witnesses and a spokesman for the Afghan military said.

A Bremerton Navy lieutenant has died of injuries suffered from an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan, the Department of Defense announced Friday.

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Thursday agreed to allow the export of 50,000 metric tonnes of wheat as a special gesture to Afghanistan.

Local Taliban militants said Thursday that the success of a peace deal with the government in Swat depends on the complete enforcement of Islamic law in the region.

A suicide bomber blew himself up as an Afghan army convoy slowed to pass a pothole-riddled section of road Friday in eastern Afghanistan, killing four soldiers and a child, a defense official said.

An executive of a Pakistani television channel says gunmen have killed one of its reporters after he interviewed a militant commander near the Afghan border.

A Pennsylvania National Guard soldier and two others were killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, military officials said Wednesday.

Afghanistan is a Muslim nation where blasphemy of Muhammad and the Quran is considered a serious crime that carries the death sentence.

Afghan village elder Haji Shahza and Capt. Jeffrey Tebo, listen to a presentation during a meeting in the village of Mian Juy, north of Kandahar.

In this March 24, 2008 file photo, a view of destruction caused by bomb explosions at Torkham along Afghanistan border in Pakistan on Monday, March 24, 2008.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Tuesday warned Pakistan against negotiating an agreement with militants along its border with Afghanistan, saying a deal might allow them to plot attacks in Pakistan and abroad.

The Bush administration is worried such an agreement, if pursued by Pakistan's newly elected government, would give the militants a free hand in Pakistan's tribal areas, which have long operated outside the central government's full control.

Al Qaeda members as well as Taliban militants are believed to have taken refuge in North and South Waziristan -- part of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) -- after U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001.

A Pentagon spokesman says the U.S. military's plan to take greater control of Afghanistan regions now under NATO command has been shelved, at least for now.

An Afghan detainee was dragged from his cell to his first pretrial hearing at Guantanamo on Wednesday, then refused to participate, telling the judge he felt "helpless."

Mohammed Kamin joined a growing detainee boycott of the war-crimes trials at the Guantanamo Bay Navy base in southeast Cuba. The military judge, Air Force Col. W. Thomas Cumbie, said Kamin tried to bite and spit on a guard on the way to the courtroom.

In his first public appearance since arriving at Guantanamo in 2004, Kamin wore a heavy beard and the orange prison uniform reserved for noncompliant prisoners, his ankles shackled above his sneakers.

Officials say violence in Afghanistan has left 18 dead, including two NATO soldiers and 14 insurgents.

A provincial governor says a roadside blast has killed five nomads and dozens of sheep in southwestern Afghanistan.

The Nimroz province Gov. Ghulam Dastagir says the nomads were transporting sheep on a truck when their vehicle hit the freshly planted bomb late on Monday.

Dastagir accused Taliban militants for the blast. It happened on the road frequently used by Afghan and foreign troops.

More than 1,200 people _ mostly militants _ have died in insurgency-related violence in Afghanistan this year, according to a tally compiled by The Associated Press.

Pro-Taliban militants have claimed responsibility for a weekend suicide bombing that killed 13 people near an Army base in north-western Pakistan, saying it was carried out to avenge a US missile attack in a ...

A FEMALE Afghani journalist was stabbed and wounded today, authorities said, a day after unknown men threatened to kill her unless she quit her job at a local television station.

A supporter of Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh holds a picture of the journalist during a rally in Kabul There's renewed international concern for Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, a young Afghan journalist sentenced to death ...

A work by one of the shortlisted artists Sara Nabil is not your typical 14-year-old artist in Afghanistan.

Not much comes as a shock to soldiers, but even for men who may have seen it all, the suicide bombing involving a young Afghan boy has taken the already bitter war in this country to a whole new level of ...

An official says a suicide bomber in eastern Afghanistan has wounded four Afghan troops and a civilian translator.

A provincial government spokesman Ghamai Mohammadyar said the bomber struck the troops on patrol in Bermel district of Paktika province on Monday.

He said four Afghan soldiers and a civilian translator working with the U.S.-led coalition troops were wounded. The bomber died in the blast.

Last year, militants launched over 140 suicide missions on Afghan and foreign troops, but most victims in such attacks have been civilians.

“This is an area of huge tactical and strategic significance for the Taliban extremists”

Australian soldiers have started "a major push" against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, the Australian government said Monday. via CNN

LAHORE: The Afghan Ambassador to the United States Saeed Jawad on Sunday counselled Pakistan to abandon negotiations with tribal elders, terming them 'militants'. According to Dawn News, Jawad told reporters in ... via Daily Times

“This is a great opportunity for the world to help Afghanistan grow and prosper”

U.S. President George Bush in Egypt Sunday said he backed a request by Afghan President Hamid Karzai for $50 billion in foreign aid. via Political Gateway

In a 1998 file photo Osama bin Laden speaks to the journalists in Khost, Afghanistan. via Florida Times-Union

“It's against the humanity, it's against the world and I have lost my own great leader, Benazir Bhutto, because of terrorism”

Sharm Al Shaikh: US President George W. Bush and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani on Sunday pledged to fight terrorism with strong relations between the two nations. via Gulfnews

A suicide bomber blew himself up next to a police convoy in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, killing four civilians and wounding eight other people, an official said.

A U.S.-coalition member and another civilian died in a separate roadside blast, also in the south.

The suicide bomber was targeting the district police chief in Musa Qala in Helmand province, but instead killed four civilians, said provincial police chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal. Eight other people, including five policemen were wounded, he said. Read more

“I didn't write this article. I didn't print it. I didn't distribute it. I reject these accusations”

Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh 24, an Afghan journalist, looks from inside his cell at Pul-e-Charki prison, east of Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, May 17, 2008. via HendersonvilleNews.com

“We had an operation last night and the forces found the place where the Indian and Nepalese were and we freed them. We arrested the head of the kidnapping group”

Afghan security forces freed an Indian and a Nepalese national kidnapped a month ago in the western province of Herat, a provincial intelligence chief said on Sunday. via Hindustan Times

By Abdul Qodous

MUSA QALA, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Suspected Taliban insurgents fired at a NATO helicopter carrying a provincial governor in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, forcing it to make an emergency landing, a Reuters witness said.

The helicopter was flying Helmand governor Golab Mohammad Mangal to Musa Qala in Helmand province when it was hit close to the town, a former Taliban stronghold captured from the insurgents by Afghan, British and U.S. forces in December.

"I was the target of this attack. It was the work of the enemies of Afghanistan," Mangal told reporters traveling with him. Read more

President Bush has arrived in Egypt where he's opening two-days of talks with key allies on Mideast peace negotiations and the fight against al-Qaida. Bush is meeting with leaders from Egypt, Afghanistan, ... via KFVS

“Our existing theater internment facility is deteriorating”

The United States intends to build a big new prison at its main military base in Afghanistan, a shift from earlier aims to transfer most detainees to Afghan custody, The New York Times reported. via News-Times

The brother of Pakistan's ambassador to Afghanistan says the envoy has been released _ three months after he was kidnapped near the border between the two countries.

Tariq Azizuddin disappeared along Feb. 11 along with his driver and bodyguard as they drove from the Pakistani city of Peshawar toward the Afghan border.

On a video aired April 19 on an Arab satellite channel, Azizuddin said Taliban militants had kidnapped them.

But his brother Tahir Azizuddin said Saturday that authorities had informed the family that the ambassador had been released, was in good health, and would likely reach home later in the day. Read more

“We reinforce this message at every opportunity”

The United States has warned Beijing over reported use of Chinese weapons by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Asian giant's continued sale of arms to Iran, Deputy Secretary of State John ... via Raw Story

“They were trained and re-armed and they are still being used.”

Photo / Reuters Secret Afghan death squads are acting on the orders of foreign spies and killing civilians inside Afghanistan with impunity, a senior UN envoy has claimed. via The New Zealand Herald

In a 1998 file photo Osama bin Laden speaks to the journalists in Khost, Afghanistan. via The Topeka Capital-Journal

“In December 2007 Officers stopped and searched a man under section 44 of the Terrorism Act at Terminal 5. Inquiries revealed he was in breach of bail.”

Comments Afghan hijacker Nazzamuddin Mohammidy One of the nine Afghans who won the right to live in Britain after hijacking a plane is now working at Heathrow airport as a cleaner, it emerged last night. via Daily Mail

Clashes in eastern and southern Afghanistan left eight militants dead, and a roadside bomb killed an Afghan soldier, officials said Friday.

The bomb hit a group of Afghan soldiers during a foot patrol Friday morning in southern Kandahar province, said Rehmatullah Khan, the Afghan army commander in Zhari district. One soldier was killed and three were wounded, he said.

In neighboring Zabul province, Taliban militants attacked the compound of the Shinkay district chief Thursday night, and the ensuing hour-long gun battle left five Taliban dead and six wounded, said the district chief, Barat Khan. There were no police casualties, he said. Read more

“We hope to formalize the agreement in two or three days.”

Pakistan has begun shifting troops from parts of the South Waziristan region and swapped prisoners with the militants in an effort to make peace with an al Qaeda-linked commander, officials said on Wednesday. via Reuters

“I believe that against the backdrop of a multi-polar world it is necessary to advance cooperation between Russia, China and India, the three countries that are rapidly growing and enjoying strong economic growth”

By Conor Sweeney

YEKATERINBURG, Russia (Reuters) - China, India and Russia called on Thursday for the creation of a security belt around Afghanistan to halt the spread of heroin.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said a joint communique on boosting links between the three large developing countries would look at enhanced co-operation on humanitarian aid, fighting terrorism and combating drug trafficking.

"We discussed the situation around Afghanistan, where the drug threat emanates. It would help to build drug-secure belt