Like their counterparts in Pakistan, Afghanistan’s Taliban demonstrate once again that they aren’t above blowing up their cannon fodder at mosques—during Ramadan—to enforce their supposedly purist version of Islam. Now didn’t we hear somewhere, “Do not fight them at the Holy… Read moreTaliban don’t read Koran, do they?
Supposedly temporary restrictions on freedom of expression in the run-up to Afghanistan’s presidential vote are drawing protests from country’s press.
A bomb blast killed at least seven in the Pakistani town of Charsadda. The Taliban claimed responsibility, saying the victims belonged to a tribe that had raised an anti-Taliban militia.
US Marines and Afghan forces destroyed hundreds of tons of opium and heroin in Helmand, in raids that officials say are part of a shift in counter-narcotics strategy.
Maulana Abdul Aziz warned that Pakistan faces a “bloody revolution” unless sharia law is announced nationwide. A bomb blast at the home of another cleric left at least nine dead.
Rights observers in Afghanistan say US forces may have been directly involved in the mass slaying of up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners in 2001 who were sent across the desert in shipping containers.
At least 25 were killed in Afghanistan’s Logar province after a truck loaded with explosives hidden under firewood was remotely detonated. Of the dead, only four were police; 16 were schoolchildren.
Some 4,000 US Marines moved into villages in Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province—a remote area that is at the center of the country’s opium cultivation.
At least 10 militants were killed in another presumed US drone strike on Pakistan’s tribal areas. There have been an estimated 35 US strikes since last August, killing over 340 people.
Pakistani jet-fighters ran bombing raids over North Waziristan tribal region, killing seven people near Miramshah. Taliban militias have imposed a ban on any tribal councils holding peace talks.
Pakistan’s government is establishing a Sufi Advisory Council, with an aim of combating extremism by promoting Sufism and its pacifistic vision of Islam.
Militant cleric Sufi Mohammed, who brokered the failed Swat Valley peace deal, has been arrested and transferred to a “safehouse” in Peshawar, an unnamed official told Italy’s AKI news service.
