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| Afghanistan |
| NATO kills 15 militants in Afghan air strike |
| 2008-06-24 |
| KHOST, Afghanistan (AFP) - NATO warplanes killed 15 militants after rebels attacked a government building in Afghanistan Tuesday, officials said, while an Afghan policewoman was killed in the first attack of its kind. Several foreign militants were among the dead after the airstrike by the NAT0-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in the eastern province of Paktia, near the troubled border with Pakistan, officials said. Insurgents opened fire on the headquarters of the province's Sayed Karam district but were driven away after a gunbattle which caused slight damage to the building, provincial government spokesman Rohullah Samoon said. "NATO helicopters then bombed the militants and killed 14 militants on the spot. Our policemen arrested another four wounded, and one of the wounded also died in hospital," Samoon told AFP. The injured rebels were from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, he said. "The three arrested terrorists have told police that most of the 15 Taliban killed in the air strike were Pakistani nationals and some of them from Arab countries," he said. NATO's press office for eastern Afghanistan said an unmanned aerial vehicle "positively identified" more than a dozen militants after they clashed with Afghan police and that close air support killed "several" rebels. The attack came a day after the separate US-led coalition said airstrikes and clashes had killed 55 militants who ambushed a patrol in eastern Afghanistan. In other violence two gunmen on motorcycles opened fire on a female policewoman, named as 26-year-old Bibi Hoor, while she was on her way home in the Guzara district of Herat province, in western Afghanistan, late Monday, police said. "Bibi Hoor is the first policewoman to be assassinated by the enemies of Afghanistan," police spokesman Abdul Raof Ahmadi told AFP, using a phrase that Afghan officials often employ to refer to the Taliban. A police patrol arrested the men and they were under interrogation, he said. There was no claim of responsibility for the attack but the Taliban were strongly opposed to women working or receiving education under their six-year rule and banned them from leaving home without a male relative. Herat and other western provinces bordering Iran see sporadic Taliban-linked violence but are generally more peaceful than southern and eastern areas on the mountainous Pakistani frontier. The Afghan government, meanwhile, Tuesday said a "foreign intelligence agency" was behind a brazen April assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai during a military parade in Kabul. Karzai survived but three Afghans died. Hmmmmmmmmm? Whoever could they mean? It did not name the country but Afghan officials including Karzai have in the past accused neighbouring Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) of supporting the Taliban. "Evidence shows the hallmark of a particular foreign intelligence agency which we believe was behind this attack," Karzai's spokesman Homayun Hamidzada said, citing an investigation into the incident. |
| Posted by:tu3031 |
| #1 More, please. |
| Posted by: anymouse 2008-06-24 16:23 |