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A total of 29 NATO troops have been killed this month, including 10 on Monday alone _ seven of them Americans. It was the deadliest day for the military alliance in seven months.
Suicide attack kills 40 at Afghan wedding party
At least 40 people have been killed by a suicide bomber
Suicide bomber kills 40 at Afghan wedding
A homicide bomb ripped through a wedding party in full swing in the Taliban's heartland in southern Afghanistan, killing at least 40 people and wounding dozens more, officials said Thursday.
Agha Mohammed, who survived the blast, said the guests were all seated and having a meal when the explosion occurred, sending a huge fireball and smoke into the sky.
"We have experience with war and this does not look like a suicide bombing," Mohammed said.
"The Taliban say they are not responsible, saying they deplore it and condemn it in the strongest terms."
"But it looks like it is not going to happen as a major operation now. One reason is the Afghan government has major concerns over a major operation.
"We do know that there is a lot of special forces' activity there which they don't talk about so much and a lot of Taliban activity who are trying to take out senior government figures."
Originally posted by GoodFella
Not really news that NATO is doing these operations.
The first i heard about something like this was about those two disguised british operatives who ended up getting caught, and were then literally ripped out of jail with tanks and whatnot.
The questions is - as people around the world are waking up, how far is the devil willing to go to hang on to his house of cards?
In an interview with Al Jazeerah TV, the popular Iraqi leader Fattah al-Sheikh, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly and deputy official in the Basra governorate, said that police had "caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market." Contrary to British authorities' claims that the soldiers had been immediately handed to local militia, al-Sheikh confirmed that they were "at the Intelligence Department in Basra, and they were held by the National Guard force, but the British occupation forces are still surrounding this department in an attempt to absolve them of the crime."
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, June 11 (Xinhua) -- A roadside bomb hit a minibus in southern Afghanistan's restive province of Kandahar on Friday, killing nine civilians and wounding eight others.
General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, acknowledged on Thursday that the campaign wouldmove more slowly than initially planned.
His forecast echoed comments by his deputy in the south, suggesting Kandahar is presenting a bigger challenge than expected, amid a shortage of Afghan security forces and scepticism among the local population.
In neighboring Zabul province, a suicide bomber dressed in a burqa detonated his cache of explosives in a shopping area in Shahjoy district, killing two civilians and wounding at least 16 others, said Mohammad Jan Rasoolyar, a spokesman for the provincial governor.
In an interview with Al Jazeerah TV, the popular Iraqi leader Fattah al-Sheikh, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly and deputy official in the Basra governorate, said that police had "caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market." Contrary to British authorities' claims that the soldiers had been immediately handed to local militia, al-Sheikh confirmed that they were "at the Intelligence Department in Basra, and they were held by the National Guard force, but the British occupation forces are still surrounding this department in an attempt to absolve them of the crime."
This fascinating new study shows how the CIA and the British secret service, in collaboration with the military alliance NATO and European military secret services, set up a network of clandestine anti-communist armies in Western Europe after World War II.
These secret soldiers were trained on remote islands in the Mediterranean and in unorthodox warfare centres in England and in the United States by the Green Berets and SAS Special Forces. The network was armed with explosives, machine guns and high-tech communication equipment hidden in underground bunkers and secret arms caches in forests and mountain meadows. In some countries the secret army linked up with right-wing terrorist who in a secret war engaged in political manipulation, harrassement of left wing parties, massacres, coup d'états and torture.
Codenamed 'Gladio' ('the sword'), the Italian secret army was exposed in 1990 by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti to the Italian Senate, whereupon the press spoke of "The best kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II" (Observer, 18. November 1990) and observed that "The story seems straight from the pages of a political thriller." (The Times, November 19, 1990). Ever since, so-called 'stay-behind' armies of NATO have also been discovered in France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Greece and Turkey. They were internationally coordinated by the Pentagon and NATO and had their last known meeting in the NATO-linked Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) in Brussels in October 1990.
"Some of the enemies sprayed poison gas from outside into the high school compound," Ghani Khan, a Ghazni police official, said.
Originally posted by aquaman411
i thought south korea's ship was sunk so we could go to war with north korea
At least 500 Afghan tribal leaders, who were against the invasion of the country by US-led forces, have been suspiciously killed in Kandahar in the past eight years.
According to a list received by Press TV's correspondent in Afghanistan, more than 500 tribal leaders in the southern provinces of Afghanistan especially Kandahar have been killed in suspicious manners after the US invasion of the country in 2001.
The list cites the names of the killed Afghan figures, their tribes, their place of birth and the place they were killed.
U.S. Training Center, an affiliate of the controversial mercenary group formerly known as Blackwater, has been given a major new contract to provide security for U.S. diplomats in two Afghan cities.
The contract, confirmed by the U.S. State Department on Saturday, would be worth over $120 million if extended for a full 18-months, according to CNN. Initial terms guaranteed 12 months of service.
eremiah
Attacks that have continued across Pakistani towns and cities are being blamed on Tehreek e-Taliban, Pakistan's Taliban.
However, the group has issued its first video statement denying involvement in targeting civilians and has blamed external forces for at least two recent blasts.
Azam Tariq, a spokesman of the Tehreek e-Taliban, posted the video statement on YouTube on Monday.
The message refers to a bombing at the Islamic University in Islamabad, which the spokesman said was orchestrated to prepare the ground for a military operation in South Waziristan, a stronghold for Pakistan's Taliban fighters.
He also said his group had no role in the bomb blast in a Peshawar market that killed at least 100 people as well as an attack in Charsada, a town located in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province.
Tariq said Taliban attacks never aimed to target civilians, but that the explosions were linked to Blackwater activities in the country.
Blackwater is a private military and security company founded in the United States.
Propaganda war
Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said: "Even when those bomb blasts did happen, the Taliban denied they had anything to do it."
He said: "It was surprising to see that it [the video message] came up on the al-Sahab video. That is the Al-Qaeda wing of media publicity."
Blackwater has denied having any contracts in Pakistan.
Hyder added: "There is a growing anger among Pakistanis. If one looks at the type of attacks that have been taking place - indiscriminate attacks – the first thing that came out, even reported by local media, was the blaming of Blackwater and other American agencies.
"The public opinion has turned against the Americans. The video that has appeared today would be trying to capitalise on that."
english.aljazeera.net...
WASHINGTON — US Defense Secretary Robert Gates rejected suggestions Sunday that US forces will move out of Afghanistan in large numbers in July of next year under a deadline set by President Barack Obama.
"That absolutely has not been decided," Gates said in an interview with Fox News Sunday.
Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.
Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a "bleeding ulcer." In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want.
Two separate bomb blasts in Afghanistan have killed at least eight civilians and wounded six others amid rising violence in the war-weary country.
The blasts took place in the southern provinces of Helmand and Zabul on Sunday.
A remote-controlled bomb blast in a bazaar in Helmand killed four civilians and injured five, while a roadside bomb in Zabul killed four more civilians and injured another one.
The blasts have been blamed on the Taliban, but there has been no word from the militants regarding the attacks.
Civilian casualties have been on the rise in Afghanistan.
Three powerful bomb explosions have killed 11 people and wounded seven others in the troubled southern Afghanistan.
ISLAMABAD // Officials believe a twin suicide bomb attack on a Sufi shrine in Lahore late on Thursday, which killed at least 42 pilgrims and injured around 170, may have been the work of a militant faction based in central Punjab province, suggesting a new type of threat facing the Pakistani government.
The attacks on shrine of Syed Abul Hassan bin Usman bin Ali al Hajveri, a holy place for Sufis, follows an attack in May on two mosques in Lahore belonging to the minority Ahmedi sect, considered by extremists to be heretics of Islam.
Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), one of the biggest militant groups operating in the region, immediately denied responsibility for the attacks, saying the group only targets state security. Azam Tariq, the shadowy TTP spokesman, speaking to Agence France-Presse, even went as far to condemn “this brutal act”, blaming it on unspecified foreign intelligence agencies.
The Taliban has denied responsibility for what is being called the worst bombing in Afghanistan's history, in which at least 80 people were killed and dozens more wounded by a suicide bomber's blast at a dog-fighting event.