Human Rights Watch: Afghan President Hamid Karzai should issue a pardon for Parwez Kambakhsh, a student and part-time journalist, whose 20-year prison sentence for blasphemy has been upheld by the Supreme Court, Human Rights Watch said today. The Supreme Court decision was the final stage in a highly politicized case that has repeatedly flouted Afghan and international law and highlighted the lack of professionalism among the Afghan judiciary.      Full news...

SBS: Dateline speaks with an Afghan family who claim to have witnessed several children being killed when Australian troops stormed their home in Oruzgan Province. Out of at least six people killed in the battle, five were children. We bring you an exclusive interview with the family of those children, who claim it happened without warning or provocation. This is how Australia first learnt that five children had been killed by ADF soldiers serving in Afghanistan.      Full news...

USA Today: Afghan demonstrators blocked the path of a U.S. military convoy in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday after an overnight U.S. raid killed four Afghans and wounded two, an official and protesters said. Protesters in the eastern city of Khost threw rocks at the convoy, shouted "Death to America" and burned tires in the road, sending up dark plumes of smoke. Several hundred men gathered in the street, preventing the vehicles from passing.      Full news...

UNAMA: The High Commissioner noted that there has been a dramatic increase in threats and intimidation against women in public life or who work outside the home. Women working with government agencies, national and international organisations, journalists, police, and lawyers have all reported death-threat letters and phone calls. As a result, many women in public life have been forced to curtail their activities or abandon their jobs. The report calls for the protection of women and girls in both the private and public sphere and this must be translated into policies and concrete programmes.      Full news...

PAN: A furious husband, suspecting his wife of having illicit relations with another person, has reportedly cut off her ears in western Ghor province. Sherin Taj, 30, resident of Khoranj village of Charsadad district suffered the torture from her husband Abdul Qader on Monday night. Masuma Anawari, head of Women Affairs Department in the province told Pajhwok Afghan News Abdul Qader after badly beating his wife also cut off her ears and hairs with scissors.      Full news...

AFP: A joint inquiry by the NATO-led international force in Afghanistan and Afghan authorities has concluded that eight civilians were killed during a recent battle with insurgents in the south. In a joint statement, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force and the government of Helmand province said 17 other civilians were wounded in the February 23 firefight which erupted when an ISAF patrol was ambushed.      Full news...

The Associated Press: Afghan civilians will bear the brunt of an escalation in the Afghan war this year as thousands more U.S. troops deploy unless more is done by NATO forces and Taliban militants to protect them, a top Red Cross official said Monday. Civilian casualties in Afghanistan are "significantly higher" today than a year ago, and an intensification of the conflict this year could mean that consequences for many more Afghans will be "dire in the extreme," said Pierre Krahenbuhl, the director of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross.      Full news...

Amnesty International: President Barack Obama approved the deployment of extra troops in Afghanistan last week and urged NATO allies to follow suit. "2008 was the most violent year for civilians since the fall of the Taleban and Afghans are increasingly resentful about civilians casualties caused by international forces during night raids and other actions of this sort," said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific director.. "The challenge for the USA and its allies is to ensure that the surge of international troops into the country will provide better security for Afghans, and not put them at greater risk."      Full news...

RIA Novosti: Hundreds of Afghans in the southern city of Kandahar protested the deaths of two boys, believed to have been killed by a Canadian rocket. Some media sources reported the children were killed when a missile hit a house in the Panjwai village. Five other people were injured. However Canadian media reported that the children may have died when an unexploded bomb detonated as they searched for scrap metal in the Panjwai valley. A local police chief said the deaths may have been caused by a Taliban attack.      Full news...

IRIN: Dozens of people involved in relief work were kidnapped and/or killed in 2008 and large consignments of aid items were pillaged by insurgents and criminal groups, according to the UN. Ahmad Wali (not his real name) works for a local NGO in Logar Province, about 60 km south of Kabul and where four employees of the International Rescue Committee were killed by unidentified armed men in August 2008. Wali spoke to IRIN about the risks he faces.      Full news...

The Mail: President Obama has angered human rights groups by saying terror suspects seized in Afghanistan cannot challenge their detention in US courts. The US Justice Department says 600 ‘enemy combatants’ held at Bagram air base have no constitutional rights. Human rights groups had hoped Mr Obama would take a different stance to George W. Bush’s.      Full news...

RAWA News: If Afghan victims of American or NATO forces get mentioned at all in the mainstream press, it is the dead. Those permanently maimed in “precision” air strikes or midnight assaults by U.S. Special Forces hardly ever are worthy of notice. Yet, such attacks result in injured as well as wounded; indeed, the ratio of wounded to civilians killed in the predominant air attacks in Afghanistan during the initial U.S. bombing campaign was about 1.8 to 1. This ratio has likely decreased as the fighting became more lethally focused, but a decreasing ratio raises the specter of war crimes having been committed against civilians.      Full news...

Focus Information Agency: The document, prepared by the Pentagon on behalf of the US-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan and seen by The Independent, also reveal how swathes of the country have slipped out of the control of President Hamid Karzai’s government. According to a poll taken towards the end of last year, a third of the population stated that the Taliban had more influence in their locality. he growing unpopularity of Mr Karzai, along with accusations of corruption against figures associated with his government, has led the new US administration to repeatedly warn the Afghan President he will lose Washington’s support in the coming national elections unless there are drastic changes.      Full news...

IWPR: US forces in Afghanistan claim to have killed up to 15 militants associated with an infamous warlord in Herat province in an airstrike, but district officials and eyewitnesses say that the dead were a family of Kuchis, or nomads, who were camped out nearby. Ghulam Mahboob Afzalzada, district governor of Gozara, insisted the strike had claimed the lives of Kuchis, a nomadic people who shepherd their animals throughout the country. Eyewitness say six women, five men, and four children in the village of Karez Sultan were killed in the strike. Several hundred animals are also said to have been killed there.      Full news...

AP: The number of Afghan civilians killed in armed conflict surged to a record 2,118 people last year as the Afghan war turned increasingly bloody, the U.N. said in a new report Tuesday. The deaths rose 40 percent last year, and the numbers could grow as the United States plans to shift tens of thousands of soldiers to Afghanistan this year to take on the Taliban and other militants.      Full news...

Daily News: An Afghan diplomat was charged Friday with beating his wife "like a dog" for more than 15 hours in their Queens home, prosecutors said. Mohammed Fagirad, 30, a vice consul at the Afghanistan Consulate, brutalized his wife inside their Flushing home from about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday until nearly midnight, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said. During the attack, Fagirad bit, slapped, choked and beat the 22-year-old woman with a belt, pushed her down a flight of stairs and sat on her chest, prosecutors said.      Full news...

Reuters: Afghanistan condemned on Friday the killing of civilians in a raid by Australian soldiers in the south of the country which it says was not coordinated with Afghan forces. The Australian Defence Force said five children had been killed in a shootout between Taliban insurgents and Australian Special Forces in southern Uruzgan province on Thursday, where they were "clearing" a number of compounds.      Full news...

PAN: 16 cases of self-immolation have been registered in Badghis province while the total numbers of cases of violence against women were 33 during last 11 months. Aqila, 18, mother of three children who married three years back said: "I was not happy with marriage, my father married me to a 40 year old man on 0.4 million afghanis, my husband was beating me up and my mother in law was insulting me without any reason"      Full news...

BBC News: An assault on three government buildings in the Afghan capital, Kabul, has left at least 27 people, including eight attackers, dead. The interior ministry said overall 35 people were injured. The attacks come in the week the new US envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, is expected to visit Kabul.      Full news...

PAN: US forces in southeastern Khost province killed a principal of a middle school and injured his wife and a child, an official said Saturday. He said that the school principal Qabol Khan was traveling along with his wife and a child when came under fire by the US forces. Qabol, his wife and the child sustained bullet injuries, he added. The spokesman said that the troops shifted all the injured to Bagram Air Base for treatment, but Qabol died of his wounds.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): A man poured acid on the face of his wife and she is in a critical condition in the Kunduz Hospital. This act was committed in the Fourth Region of Kunduz City last night by a teacher called Shakir Mohammad against his 26-year old wife, Alia. According to her information, Alia had not gone to Khan Abad with him and stayed in her father’s home. Her husband had entered and the splashed acid on her face the moment he faced her.      Full news...

CNN: A British army officer has been arrested in Afghanistan for allegedly supplying sensitive civilian casualty figures to a human rights campaigner, a British newspaper reported Wednesday. The Ministry of Defence confirmed that an officer was being returned to Britain for questioning on suspicion of leaking state secrets. The figures are controversial, The Sun reported, because critics question official estimates. The paper added that the U.S. military was angry over the reported leak.      Full news...

IRIN: In Afghanistan, particularly in poor rural communities, child slavery and debt bondage practices are growing, but are often disguised as marriage, labour or family affairs not requiring state intervention. Haleem, aged nine, is a full-time servant for US$60 a month at Abdul Malik Khan's house in Zherok District, Paktika Province, southeastern Afghanistan. His tasks range from cleaning, washing, serving tea and baby-sitting to night patrols and gate-keeping.      Full news...

RAWA News: Much official ado has been made in Washington D.C. and in the U.S. corporate press about how the new Administration will be taking far greater care as regards Afghan civilians. Data analyzed below for January 2009 suggests that the deadliness of the Afghan war for civilians under the Obama clock significantly exceeds that registered under the outgoing Bush regime. Boys, women, girls, tribal leaders all have perished at the hands of the foreign occupiers.      Full news...

Wakht News Agency (Translated by RAWA): Authorities of the Human Rights Organization and Gul Afroz’s family, a girl who was raped, demanded severe punishment for the people accused of being involved in the crime; saying the order of the preliminary court of the Sar-e-Pul province is not enough. 13-year old Gul Afroz was gang-raped by two armed men three months back in the Kohistanat District of Sar-e-Pul Province. The accusers are not contented with the sentence of the court.      Full news...

SOS Children's Villages: Every day, as they go to school, girls in Afghanistan run a gauntlet of intimidation and harassment by youths carrying knives. From acid attacks, murder, torching of schools and sexual assault, violence against girl students is crushing the dreams of thousands of Afghan girls and women hungry to learn. In spite of the police presence near every school boys manage to tease girls and even kidnap them and sexually abuse them. In the past eight months, 138 students and teachers have died and 172 have been wounded in criminal and terror attacks, according to the Ministry of Education. About 651 schools have closed and another 122 school buildings have been blown up or burned down.      Full news...

IWPR: War crimes evidence disappearing in northern Afghanistan as perpetrators reportedly try and clear the bones from mass graves. Human rights activists say the perpetrators of these acts are trying to erase the evidence of their crimes by clearing out the mass graves that still dot the Laili desert. They want the government to act to protect the sites, so that those responsible can eventually be brought to justice. The AIHRC has received videotapes that appear to show armed men digging up bones and other remains from a mass grave in Jowzjan province, in northern Afghanistan.      Full news...

Wikinews: January 15, a United States military strike in the Afghan province of Laghman killed 15 people, according to U.S. officials. The U.S claims only militants were killed, but on Saturday, village elders disputed that claim with the allegation that the casualties were all civilians. However, this version of events was contested when a statement from the Afghani president's office declared that 16 civilians were killed, not 15 militants. That statement also claimed that two women and three children were among the dead.      Full news...

Antiwar.com: A "team of rivals" is how the Obama administration is being portrayed by the head-over-heels media, which started out by likening the new president to Lincoln and may end up comparing him – favorably – to God. Yet I'm not optimistic, for two very good reasons: Dennis Ross, whose appointment as plenipotentiary for Middle Eastern affairs seems to undercut what is likely to be the Mitchell approach, and Richard Holbrooke, whose dual domain of Afghanistan and Pakistan will be the focus of U.S. military action in the coming years. Specifically, more than 14 years – at least, that's what Holbrooke told us in a pre-election piece in Foreign Affairs magazine:...      Full news...

The New York Times: The outrage over civilian deaths swelled again over the weekend. Hundreds of angry villagers demonstrated here in Mehtarlam, the capital of Laghman Province, on Sunday after an American raid on a village in the province on Friday night. The raid killed at least 16 villagers, including 2 women and 3 children, according to a statement from President Hamid Karzai. They agreed that 13 civilians had been killed and 9 wounded when American commandos broke down doors and unleashed dogs without warning on Jan. 7 in the hunt for a known insurgent in Masamut, in Laghman Province in eastern Afghanistan. The residents were so enraged that they threatened to march on the American military base here.      Full news...