29 June 2011
Nine suicide bombers penetrated several rings of security to lay siege to one of the capital’s premier hotels for six hours overnight Tuesday in a complex attack that jolted Afghans’ sense of security and highlighted the weakness of their police forces. At least 21 people were killed: all the attackers, two policemen, nine Afghan civilians, and one foreigner, a Spaniard. One witness said that the police failed to stop a man who obviously...
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29 June 2011
The insurgency in Afghanistan has expanded far beyond its stronghold in the south east. Transcending its traditional Pashtun base, the Taliban is bolstering its influence in the central-eastern provinces by installing shadow governments and tapping into the vulnerabilities of a central government crippled by corruption and deeply dependent on a corrosive war economy. Collusion between insurgents and corrupt government officials in Kabul and the nearby...
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28 June 2011
A senior leader of an al-Qaida-linked terror group has been captured in northern Afghanistan dressed up like a woman — the latest in a recent series of cases involving male militants disguised as females, the U.S.-led military coalition said Tuesday.
A joint Afghan and coalition force apprehended a senior figure from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and two of his associates during a nighttime operation Monday in Kunduz city, NATO said.
It...
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20 June 2011
Insurgents in Afghanistan's violent east will target courts and judges after the execution of two fighters convicted over a brutal bank raid, one of the leaders of the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network said on Monday.
At least 40 people were killed when seven gunmen and suicide bombers, dressed in border police uniforms, attacked an office of private lender Kabulbank on February 19, triggering gunbattles that lasted several hours.
Security camera footage...
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20 June 2011
Suicide bombers in army uniform attacked a Kabul police compound on Saturday, killing nine people in the second major assault inside the Afghan capital in less than a month, the Interior Ministry said.
The Taliban, which claimed responsibility for the assault, vowed last month to carry out attacks on foreign and Afghan troops and government officials, and have assassinated several senior police commanders since the start of the year.
Three policemen,...
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09 May 2011
Afghan authorities paraded four young Afghan boys on Saturday who they said had been recruited as suicide bombers from homes in neighboring Pakistan and detained as they came back across the border on a mission to attack foreign troops.
The four boys, all under 13, giggled and smiled shyly at one another as they were led on to a stage before television cameras to tell how they were coerced by insurgent leaders into becoming unwitting suicide attackers.
"We...
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27 April 2011
Eight American troops and a U.S. contractor died Wednesday after an Afghan military pilot opened fire during a meeting at Kabul airport — the deadliest episode to date of an Afghan turning against his coalition partners, officials said.The Afghan officer, who was a veteran military pilot, fired on the Americans after an argument, the Afghan Defense Ministry said. [...] The shooting occurred in an operations room of the Afghan Air Corps at Kabul...
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21 April 2011
The Canadian military has confirmed that small contingents of troops will be stationed outside of Kabul when the Harper government's new training mission gets underway in Afghanistan this summer. A small group of medics will be based in the northern Afghanistan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, where UN staff were massacred a few weeks ago. A military police detachment will also conduct instruction in the western city of Herat. When it announced the training...
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19 April 2011
This paper addresses a number of deeper historical, political, and social issues involved in the current long-lasting Afghan conflict: 1. The tribal culture of warlike poverty and parasitic economic dependence on outside imperial powers that came to predominate in the region ever since the decay of Central Asia’s trade routes and commercial stagnation in the seventeenth century; 2. The durable strategic concerns of successive imperial powers...
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18 April 2011
A gunman in Afghan army uniform opened fire inside Kabul's defence ministry Monday, killing two soldiers and wounding seven in an audacious strike at the heart of government claimed by the Taliban. The attack, which the militants said was aimed at France's visiting defence minister Gerard Longuet, was the third major assault on Afghan security targets in four days and one of the worst security breaches in years. "A person in Afghan army uniform opened...
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