Pakistan announced the arrest of top al-Qaeda leader Younis al-Mauritani along with two other operatives. The arrests, in the city of Quetta, were hailed as the fruit of cooperation between Pakistan’s ISI and the CIA—despite recent friction over drone strikes.
Some 300 militants crossed into Pakistan from Afghanistan’s territory and stormed seven security checkpoints along the Durand Line, leaving several troops dead. Suicide attacks and NATO air-strikes in Afghanistan meanwhile killed several civilians.
A new report from the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism finds one US drone strike occurs every four days in Pakistan, and that the attacks have killed as many as 775 civilians, including 168 children, since 2004.
A woman and seven young children were killed in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province when a NATO patrol called in an airstrike against insurgents firing on them from a mud compound, local officials said.
A suicide bomber struck Kandahar’s historic Red Mosque during a mourning ceremony for Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s slain half-brother, regional strongman Ahmed Wali Karzai, killing the province’s leading cleric.
Pakistan publicly called a halt to US drone flights from Shamsi airbase near Quetta—yet drone strikes in Pakistan’s border regions have continued, presumably from other bases in Pakistan, or from the CIA base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
Ahmed Wali Karzai—half-brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the de facto ruling warlord of Kandahar—was assassinated by a close associate at one of his five mansions by a senior commander of his own security detail.
White House plans to draw down the 30,000 “surge” troops in Afghanistan come with a Pentagon program to expand an anti-Taliban self-defense militia force by 30,000—including former insurgents who share the Taliban ideology.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged for the first time that the US had opened preliminary talks with members of the Taliban as part of an effort to end the war in Afghanistan.
As the Taliban launch a series of audacious attacks within Pakistan, media commentators in the country increasingly see the hidden hand of CIA, Mossad or Indian intelligence behind the movement’s growing reach.
NATO air-strikes in Helmand and Nuristan provinces left scores of civilians dead, local officials said. The outrage comes amid reports that the US has opened secret talks with the Taliban.
At least 11 people were killed and more than 80 injured as a protest demonstration sparked by a deadly US raid erupted into clashes with security forces in Taliqan, capital of Afghanistan’s northeast Takhar province.
