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Roadside bomb kills Afghan border policemen
[Al Jazeera] A roadside kaboom has killed five border coppers in southern Afghanistan amid a surge in violence in the country.

Officials said on Friday that the coppers were hit when a mine blew up their vehicle in Spin Boldak district in Kandahar province, late on Thursday.

The AFP news agency said the Taliban had grabbed credit via a text message for the Spin Boldak blast.

Also on Thursday, one NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the style of the American pants...
 soldier was killed in the east and a nephew of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
... who used to be known in intelligence circles as The Most Evil Man in the World but who now seems merely run-of-the-mill evil...
, the founder of Hizb-i-Islami, died in Wardak province.

Habibullah Shoab Hekmatyar, a 17-year-old former student in Beautiful Downtown Peshawar, Pakistain, had joined the fight against international forces in Wardak.

Harun Zarghun, a front man for Hizb-i-Islami, said the nephew was killed in a coalition Arclight airstrike along with one of his colleagues in Nirkh district, Zarghun said.

NATO confirmed that there was a coalition Arclight airstrike Thursday in Nirkh, but could not confirm if Hekmatyar's nephew was among four who were killed.

The attack in Spin Boldak is the latest in a wave of attacks against Afghanistan's police and army in the run-up to the start of the transition from foreign to Afghan security control in July.

On the Pak side of the border, two Pak coppers were reportedly killed when hundreds of armed fighters came across from Afghanistan's Kunar province
... which is right down the road from Binny's house in Chitral...
.

In Khost, another province that borders Pakistain, three Afghan men who were part of a civilian police force guarding a road construction project were killed on Thursday in Spera district, the AP news agency reported an official as saying.

The men, who were part of the so-called Afghan Public Protection Force, opened fire as a NATO helicopter passed overhead.

Abdul Hakim Ishaqzai, a Khost police chief, said the men were killed by NATO forces, but the alliance has not yet commented on the incident.
Posted by: Fred 2011-04-23
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=321031