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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27 June 2011
Taliban insurgents used an eight-year-old girl carrying a bag of explosives to attack a police checkpost in central Afghanistan, the Afghan government said on Sunday, making her one of the youngest child bombers of the decade-old conflict.
The incident took place in Char Chino district of central Uruzgan province, the interior ministry said. "The insurgents handed over a bag with a homemade bomb to an eight-year-old girl and asked her to take it...
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27 June 2011
Funerals of victims of a car bombing at a hospital in Afghanistan's eastern Logar province have been taking place.
Thirty-eight people, including pregnant women, children, doctors and nurses, died in the attack, officials say - the deadliest on a medical facility since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
The hospital, in Azra district, was destroyed, leaving people buried under rubble.
Officials blamed the attack on the Taliban, but the group denied...
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27 May 2011
Attacks against NGOs by armed opposition have remained stable and low throughout the Q1 (p.3), although
the overall level of incidents, including criminal acts, has grown by 38%. The criminal sector saw an increase
of 50% (p.4) with attacks by AOG increasing by a lower rate of 29% (or just four actual attacks). A total of seven
persons have been killed, comparable to eight at Q1 2010, all by small arms fire either as a result of deliberate
intent...
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26 May 2011
Eight NATO service members were killed Thursday in Afghanistan, including seven who died when a powerful bomb exploded in a field where they were patrolling on foot, the international military coalition and Afghan police said.
Two Afghan policemen also died and two others were wounded in the explosion in mountainous Shorabak district of Kandahar province, 12 miles (19 kilometers) from the Pakistan border, said Gen. Abdul Raziq, chief of the Afghan...
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24 May 2011
A roadside bomb killed 10 workers in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday, and NATO again promised that the coalition would not abandon the country even if some members plan to withdraw their forces. Also Tuesday, two high-ranking government officials survived attempted assassinations. […] The workers on the truck were employed by the local government in the region to clean up rivers and streams, according to Dr. Qayoum Pakhla, the director of...
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28 March 2011
In February 2006, with roadside bombs killing more and more American soldiers in Iraq, the Pentagon created an agency to defeat the deadly threat and tasked a retired four-star general to run it. Five years later, the agency has ballooned into a 1,900-employee behemoth and has spent nearly $17 billion on hundreds of initiatives. Yet the technologies it's developed have failed to significantly improve U.S. soldiers' ability to detect unexploded roadside...
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09 March 2011
Targeted killings of civilians in Afghanistan doubled last year, the United Nations said on Wednesday, as an expanding insurgency strikes at Western efforts to build up the Afghan government and security forces. In an annual report, the United Nations said 2010 marked the most lethal year for noncombatants in the nearly decade-old war, with a 15 percent increase in the number of civilians killed to 2,777 -- continuing a steady rise over the past...
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04 March 2011
The general believes he and his team have significantly improved the military’s ability to dismantle insurgent bomb-making networks and find specific IEDs before they can be set off. But as he prepares to relinquish command this Friday, Oates acknowledged that the IED fight is far from won. “Statistically, you can’t argue that things are getting better in terms of IED efficacy in Afghanistan,” [outgoing Oates said, pointing...
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16 February 2011
EXCERPT: "Soldiers in Afghanistan could detonate improvised explosive devices (IEDs) with a remote tool created by researchers in Switzerland. The technology can activate homemade landmines at a distance of up to 25m by transmitting electromagnetic waves at a range of frequencies. This inducts a current in the devices and causes them to explode. Researchers from the Swiss technology institute EPFL have worked for two years with the universities of...
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