Afghan security forces attacked a group of suspected Taliban rebels after they crossed the border from neighboring Pakistan and killed at least 15 of them, an army commander said yesterday.
Another four insurgents fled back across the frontier after the two-hour gun battle late on Tuesday near the border town of Spin Boldak in Kandahar Province, said Abdul Razak, the frontier security commander.
Included among the dead was a midlevel Taliban commander, Mullah Shien, who for months has allegedly led several cross-border raids from secret bases on the Pakistani side of the frontier, Razak said.
His followers would regularly attack foreign and Afghan troops and bomb trucks hauling gasoline for the US-led coalition, he said.
"We got a tip-off about them coming across the border. We went down there and fought them," the commander said. "We now have all the dead bodies."
Pakistan's Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed denied that Taliban militants had crossed from Pakistan.
"It's nonsense: just another allegation. We have our security forces there who are guarding the border," he said.
Saqib Aziz, a top government administrator at Chaman, a Pakistani town adjacent to Spin Bokdak, said the people killed by Afghan security forces were not Taliban fighters but belonged to the Noorzai tribe -- a Pashtun sub-tribe -- whose people live on both sides of the border and frequently travel across the frontier. He didn't know what sparked the fighting.
The fighting was the deadliest in weeks in Afghanistan and may stoke a dispute between Kabul and Islamabad about militants sneaking back and forth across the two countries' 2,450km-long frontier, most of which is unmarked and unguarded.
Afghanistan has long demanded that Pakistan do more to crack down on militants based on its side. Islamabad has repeatedly said it's doing all it can, pointing to the 80,000 Pakistani troops in the region.
Earlier this month, Pakistani officials claimed that insurgents were joining tribal fighting in Pakistan's North Waziristan region.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was