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March 3, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Deutsche Welle (Translated by RAWA): Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) has demanded the judicial bodies of Afghanistan to investigate the case of a 17-year old girl who was raped by a local influential. The girl claimed that she was raped by the head of the Provincial Council of Kunar. Full news...
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March 3, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
RFE/RL: Hundreds of Afghan protesters poured into the streets of the northeastern provincial capital Assad-Abad on March 2 over the death of nine civilians killed in a NATO air strike, RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan reports. NATO officially apologized on March 2 for what it called an “accident.” It said in a statement that "[the NATO-led] International Security Assistance Force apologizes... Full news...
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March 2, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
PAN: The chief of police in eastern Kunar province on Wednesday confirmed that nine children had been killed in a NATO-led airstrike the previous day. The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said it would investigate the claims. Residents of Manogi district on Tuesday said the airstrike killed as many as 10 children as they collected firewood in Nangalam valley. Full news...
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March 2, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
AFP: Armed conflict is keeping 28 million children around the world out of schools, where they are often targets of sexual abuse and violence, according to a report released Tuesday by UNESCO. The report titled “The Hidden Crisis: Armed Conflict and Education” said that 42 percent of children not enrolled in schools around the world live in poor countries wracked by conflict. Full news...
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March 2, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The New Yorker: Ten boys went out to gather firewood in a valley in Afghanistan on Tuesday. Only one came home; his name is Hemad, and this is what he had to say, as quoted in the Times: ...he helicopters hovered over us, scanned us and we saw a green flash from the helicopters. Then they flew back high up, and in a second round they hovered over us and started shooting. They fired a rocket which landed on a tree. Full news...
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March 1, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
PAN: Taliban insurgents killed four people for allegedly spying on behalf of the US in North Waziristan, a tribal region of Pakistan close to the Afghan border, an official said on Tuesday. The dead bodies were found on a roadside on Tuesday morning in Datakhel area on the outskirts of Miranshah town, an official in the town, Mohammad Imran, told Pajhwok Afghan News. Full news...
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February 28, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Huffington Post: The chairmen of the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting decried on Monday a federal system that has allowed contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan to commit fraud -- then get hired again and again.“For the 200,000 people employed by contractors to provide support and capability in Iraq and Afghanistan, accountability is too often absent, diluted, delayed, or avoided,”... Full news...
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February 26, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Washington Post: More than 200 Afghans were killed in attacks and military operations during the past two weeks, Afghan officials said Saturday, calling it the deadliest period for civilians since the war began. Two attacks on Saturday added to that toll and fueled fears that violence will climb as winter, typically a slow fighting season in Afghanistan, gives way to spring. Full news...
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February 26, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Reuters/BBC: Afghan government investigators say about 65 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed in a NATO operation last week. But NATO insists there was not a single civilian casualty during its offensive in Kunar province. No video or photographs have yet emerged, either of the operation or of any bodies. Full news...
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February 25, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
AFP: Corruption and waste has cost the US government billions of reconstruction dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an official study on wartime contracting released on Thursday. The report found that “criminal behavior and blatant corruption” were responsible for much of the waste related to the nearly 200 billion USD spent since 2002 on US reconstruction and other projects in the two countries. Full news...
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February 24, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
AFP: Progress made on ensuring girls in Afghanistan go to school is at risk as foreign countries prepare to withdraw from the war-torn country, a coalition of 16 aid agencies warned Thursday. It added that many donors are increasingly focusing on counter-insurgency projects rather than education ahead of Afghanistan’s army and police taking control of security in 2014 from international troops. Full news...
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February 24, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Reuters: The growing use of “night raids” by NATO-led and Afghan forces to kill or capture insurgents is one of the most controversial strategies in the Afghan war. Here are some accounts by Afghan civilians of night raids they experienced, which left them injured or bereaved. Full news...
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February 24, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Deutsche Presse Agentur: Fire from a NATO helicopter allegedly killed five civilians including two children in north-eastern Afghanistan Thursday after mistaking them for militants, a local official said. The pre-dawn strike happened as the civilians were climbing a mountain for bird-hunting in Ala Sai district of Kapisa province, Mullah Mohammad Omari, the district chief, said. Full news...
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February 24, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
AFP: The security situation in Afghanistan has worsened to its lowest point since the toppling of the Taliban a decade ago and attacks on aid workers are at unprecedented levels, a UN envoy said Wednesday. “From the humanitarian perspective, security is on everyone’s minds,” said Robert Watkins, the outgoing UN deputy special representative of the Secretary General for Afghanistan. Full news...
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February 23, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
PAN: Foreign forces detained three journalists who visited the site of a coalition airstrike that killed 64 people in the Ghaziabad district of eastern Kunar province, police said on Wednesday. However, the two Al Jazeera and one Afghan TV reporters were freed after more than 24 hours of detention and handed over to local officials on Tuesday night, provincial police chief, Khalilullah Ziayee, told Pajhwok Afghan News. Full news...
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February 22, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
FDL: In a meeting Sunday at the presidential palace in Kabul to investigate reports of multiple civilian deaths in a US operation in Konar province, General David Petraeus deeply offended those present when he suggested that Afghan civilians had deliberately burned their children in an effort to blame US attacks for their injuries. Full news...
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February 21, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Los Angeles Times: A suicide bomber struck a government administrative center in northern Afghanistan on Monday, killing about 30 people, many of them civilians who were trying to obtain identification cards or other official documents, the provincial government said. It was not immediately clear whether the bomber’s main target in Kunduz province was the government office or a district police post in the same complex... Full news...
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February 21, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Associated Press: The village-level fighting forces the U.S. is fostering in hopes of countering the Taliban insurgency — the concept that turned the tide of the Iraq war — are having a rocky start, with complaints that recruits are not consistently vetted for ties to criminals and warlords. The U.S. hopes the nascent project will spark uprisings against the Taliban akin to the Sunni Awakening in Iraq, in which private militias rose up against al-Qaida. Full news...
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February 21, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
PAN: An airstrike by NATO-led forces killed an Afghan army soldier along with five family members in the Khogyani district of eastern Nangarhar province, officials and relatives said on Monday. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has acknowledged the strike killed and wounded civilians and said it would look into the incident. Full news...
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February 21, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
RAWA News: The Italian women’s organization, CISDA – Coordinamento Italiano Sostegno Donne Afghane - denounces the draft regulation promoted by the Council of Ministers in January 2011, whose adoption allows the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MoWA) to take over the management of the existing shelters for women within 45 days, almost all of which are operated by Afghan non-governmental organizations. Full news...
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February 20, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
VOA: Afghan officials say a suicide attack on a Jalalabad bank has killed at least 40 people and wounded 73 others. Hospital officials increased the death toll on Sunday. On Saturday, seven militants dressed in security uniforms and armed with guns and suicide vests stormed a branch of Kabul Bank. Authorities say some of the attackers detonated their vests while others opened fire. Security forces fought the attackers for several hours. Full news...
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February 20, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Washington Post: Afghan government officials alleged that a U.S. military operation in the remote mountains of northeastern Afghanistan killed 64 innocent people, including 22 women and more than 30 children, the most serious civilian casualty allegation in months. "According to locals in the area, American helicopters have been constantly bombing the village and have caused tremendous civilian casualties," The governor of Kunar province, Fazlullah Wahidi, said in an interview. Full news...
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February 19, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Rethink Afghanistan: Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker is using phony budget projections to manufacture a staged “fiscal emergency” in his state so that he can whack programs and political opponents, but even his fake “emergency” pales in comparison to the cost of the Afghanistan War to his state. Full news...
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February 18, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The New York Times: Attacks in four parts of the country left at least 17 people dead on Friday, including two German soldiers, four Afghan police officers and 11 civilians, signaling the tenaciousness of the insurgency even through the winter. The most lethal incident occurred in the southeast province of Khost, on the edge of the provincial capital of the same name... Full news...
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February 17, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Huffington Post: Americans of all ideological persuasions are fed up with the Afghanistan War. We’re fed up with a 5.7 US$ billion-per-month military campaign that’s gone nowhere over the past 12 months. We’re fed up with being told we’ll have to do without vital public services because of the sorry state of our national finances, while at the same time our politicians are spending 2 billion USD a year to police a dusty Afghan town called Marjah. Full news...
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February 16, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Associated Press: Schoolteacher Abdul Rahman drops his voice to a whisper as he watches U.S. troops guard a street where insurgents attacked a police headquarters a day earlier in this capital of the province that was the birthplace of the Taliban. “The foreign forces are everywhere, but they are not helping us,” Rahman said as he sat in a cracked plastic lawn chair with his friends outside a photo shop. Full news...
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February 16, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
TOLOnews.com (Translated by RAWA): President Hamid Karzai has strongly condemned the killing of a young girl in Takhar province in a newspaper. The office of the president told a newspaper that the president has ordered the National Security Council, ministries of internal affairs, administration of National Security and local officials in Takhar, to arrest the people involved hand them over to the law. Full news...
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February 15, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
RFI (Translated by RAWA): In 2012, the budget of external operations will reach 117.8 billion US dollars. This is 40 billion lesser than last year meaning this budget of 2012 will be 26% lesser than the year before. US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said this decrease in budget is due to the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Full news...
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February 15, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
PAN: The number of civilians, security forces and insurgents killed last week rose to 112, a 57 percent increase on the previous week, an official said on Monday. The victims include 51 insurgents, 30 civilians and 31 policemen, the interior ministry spokesman, Zumarai Bashari, told reporters during a press conference in Kabul. Full news...
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February 15, 2011 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Ekklesia: The British government faces new pressure for the immediate withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan and a negotiated settlement which guarantees self-determination, security and human rights for the Afghan people. It comes amid mounting evidence that Afghans are paying a terrible price for the ongoing occupation of their country. Full news...