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| Afghanistan | ||||
| Toll rises to at least 22 in southern Afghanistan fighting | ||||
| 2011-05-09 | ||||
[Al Jazeera] Afghan cops appear to be close to quelling a wave of Taliban attacks in which several people died during a second day of violence in one of Afghanistan's biggest cities.
Two attackers who were holed up in a building near Kandahar's intelligence headquarters are dead, leaving just one more inside, Zalmay Ayoubi, a provincial front man, told the AFP news agency.
"Eight vehicles packed with explosives were found today and destroyed by foreign forces. One jacket wallah driving a car was identified, shot at and killed by Afghan cops." Kandahar's streets were said to be virtually deserted on Sunday, while roads into the city have been blocked off. Kandahar city is the birthplace of the Taliban and the economic hub of southern Afghanistan. Major assault Taliban forces unleashed a major assault on Saturday on government buildings, including the intelligence agency headquarters and a cop shoppe. 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... troops and helicopters could be seen supporting Afghan forces in the clash. Fighting had temporarily stopped overnight after Afghan forces had secured the government buildings which had been attacked. Of the dead attackers, eight were reported to have detonated their boom jackets, while four fighters were said to have been captured. The size and scope of the assault, which began at noon, cast doubt on the effectiveness of a year-long campaign to secure Afghanistan's south and Kandahar in particular. The Taliban claimed more than 100 fighters took part and said its goal was to take control of the city.
Nearly all the fighters are believed to have beat feet late last month from Kandahar city's main Sarposa prison. More than 480 Taliban members beat feet through a 300-metre long tunnel that took five months to dig. The Kandahar assault is the latest in an ongoing series of attacks by the Taliban on prominent government installations. Al-Qaeda 'Dire Revenge™' A statement from the office of Hamid Maybe I'll join the TalibanKarzai ... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a Pashtunface on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use... , the Afghan president, on Saturday said the attacks were Dire Revenge™ for the recent killing of al-Qaeda's leader by US forces.
... who sleeps with the fishes... in Pak territory have tried to hide this defeat by killing civilians in Kandahar and take their Dire Revenge™ on the innocent people of Afghanistan," the statement said. The Taliban issued a statement on Friday saying that the killing would boost the morale of the group, and threatening that it would show its strength. "The martyrdom of Sheik Osama bin Laden will give a new impetus to the current jihad against the invaders," the Taliban said. "The forthcoming time will prove this both for the friends and the foes." However, The didactic However... Qari Yousef Ahmadi, a Taliban front man, told the AP news agency on Saturday that the Kandahar assault was not a Dire Revenge™ attack for bin Laden's death but a plot that had been in the works for months. "This operation has been planned for a long time, for the past month or two," he said. | ||||
| Posted by:Fred |