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| Afghanistan |
| Seven de-miners beheaded in Afghanistan |
| 2011-07-11 |
| [Dawn] Seven de-miners kidnapped in western Afghanistan have been beheaded by their abductors, police said Sunday, as 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... announced the deaths of three soldiers in Taliban attacks. The seven were part of a group of 28 de-miners who were snatched on Wednesday in a district that is the focus of the Taliban insurgency in Farah province, but no one has grabbed credit for the mass kidnapping. "Seven of the de-miners are beheaded. We have recovered the body of one of them and the rest of the bodies are with tribal elders," said Mohammad Ghaws Malyar, the Farah provincial deputy police chief. He said the fate of the other de-miners who were taken in the Bala Buluk district was unknown. Criminal groups and Orcs and similar vermin have repeatedly kidnapped dozens of Afghans and foreigners since a 2001 US-led invasion ousted the Taliban regime, but most are eventually freed for ransom or in exchange for the release of prisoners. The de-miners were working for the Demining Agency for Afghanistan, an Afghan charity based in the southern province of Kandahar. In a similar incident in December, 18 Afghans working for the Mine Detection Center were kidnapped in the eastern province of Khost ...which coincidentally borders North Wazoo and Kurram Agency... , which borders Pakistain, and were freed unharmed a day later in a joint Afghan-foreign operation. Also Sunday, three NATO soldiers and three coppers were killed in bomb and cut-thoat attacks in the restive south and east, as the top US commander in the country said the overall number of cut-thoat attacks had decreased this summer. NATO said one coalition soldier died following an cut-thoat attack and another was killed in a bomb kaboom in the south, while a third service member died after another cut-thoat attack in the east. In southern Kandahar city, three Afghan coppers were killed, while three coppers and three civilians were maimed, in a roadside kaboom blast that destroyed a police vehicle, provincial police chief Abdul Raziqtold AFP. Sunday's incidents brought the overall corpse count for foreign forces to 293 this year in Afghanistan, according to a tally based on that collated by the independent website iCasualties.org. Overall, however, General David Petraeus said attacks were down by "a few per cent" for May and June, the beginning of the traditional annual fighting season, although he said the number of homemade bomb kabooms had risen. "June saw fewer cut-thoat attacks than last June and that's quite significant and May was quite the same," he said. "So you have the first two months of comparison with the previous year is actually a reduction. July is trending that way. That is very significant," he told news hounds in the Afghan capital Kabul. Intelligence analysts had predicted a rise in cut-thoat attacks of 18 to 30 per cent on last year, Petraeus said, while he cautioned that it was too early to declare the insurgency had been significantly hit. Petraeus made his comments as he prepares to leave his post this month and as US and other coalition forces prepare to begin a gradual drawdown of combat troops, with all due to go home by the end of 2014. US President Barack B.O.Obama has announced the withdrawal of the first 10,000 of nearly 100,000 US forces from Afghanistan this year, with another 23,000 to leave by the end of next summer. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 I'm under the impression that at least some of those mines date back to the Soviet period, Redneck Jim. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2011-07-11 14:46 |
| #1 Too much Damn work, we plant them,amd they dig them up. Hmmm, we can fix this.(Taliban) |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2011-07-11 02:21 |