KANDAHAR, Afghanistan An explosive device planted by Taliban militants killed 11 civilians on Sunday in Afghanistan’s most violent province, a government official said.The blast happened on a road in the Nawzad district of Helmand Province. The province is the focus of one of the largest NATO offensives in the eight-year-old war against the Islamist Taliban.”A [...]

ISLAMABAD A moderate earthquake has rattled northern Pakistan and Afghanistan but there are no reports of injuries or damage.Pakistani government meteorologist Qamar Zaman Chaudhry says the quake happened at 4:21 a.m. Pakistan time on Sunday (2321 GMT; 6:21 p.m. EDT on Saturday).It was felt in northern Pakistan and in Kabul, the capital of neighboring Afghanistan.
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WASHINGTON   U.S. led forces in Afghanistan will launch a new military operation later this year to get full control of Kandahar, the former “capital city” of the Taliban, a senior U.S. official said on Friday. The top U.S. general in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, had already flagged his intention to target Kandahar following an [...]

KABUL A NATO airstrike in southern Afganistan killed at least 21 civilians, the Afghan Interior Ministry said Monday, in an incident that could inflame already heightened sensitivities over noncombatant casualties.NATO forces confirmed in a statement that its planes fired Sunday on what it believed was a group of insurgents in southern Uruzgan province on their [...]

ISLAMABAD, Guerrillas detonated two sons of school buildings in northwestern Pakistan on Sunday (21.2.2010) in the last wave of attacks carried out hard-line groups that are targeted at educational institutions, it was said officials in that country.No one injured in a predawn attack on two school buildings located in the Mohmand tribal region, near the [...]

ISLAMABAD  A son of the leader of a major Taliban faction attacking Western forces in Afghanistan was killed in a recent missile strike by a U.S. drone in Pakistan, security officials said on Friday. A pilotless U.S. drone fired two missiles into a compound owned by the Haqqani militant network on Thursday in Pakistan’s North [...]

PESHAWAR, Pakistan A bomb blast at a mosque in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt killed 29 people including some militants Thursday, underscoring the relentless security threat here even as Pakistani-U.S. cooperation against extremism appears on the upswing.The attack in Khyber tribal region came as U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke met with Pakistan’s prime minister in Islamabad, [...]

TEHRAN  Iran’s supreme leader accused the United States on Wednesday of war-mongering and of turning the Gulf into an “arms depot,” hitting back at U.S. accusations that the Islamic state was moving toward a military dictatorship.The comments by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were the latest sign of growing tensions between Tehran and Washington, which are embroiled [...]

ISLAMABAD The Pakistani military confirmed on Wednesday that the Afghan Taliban’s top military commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, had been captured.U.S. and Pakistani officials who declined to be identified said on Tuesday Baradar had been captured in the Pakistani city of Karachi in a raid by Pakistani and U.S. agents.”At the conclusion of detailed identification [...]

SARGODHA,Pakistani lawyers for five young Americans accused of contacting militants over the Internet and plotting terrorist attacks sought their release on bail on Tuesday, saying the prosecution lacked evidence.The students, in their 20s and from the U.S. state of Virginia, were detained in December in the central Pakistani town of Sargodha, 190 km (120 miles) [...]