Afghan army troops and US-led forces killed at least nine militants including two of their commanders in western Afghanistan, while eight other rebels were killed in a clash with Afghan and NATO forces in a southern region, officials said yesterday.
Mullah Dastigir and eight of his fighters were killed in a US military airstrike in Darya-ye-Morghab village in western Badghis Province, close to border with Turkmenistan on Sunday night, the US military said in a statement.
“Once the exact location of the militants was confirmed, forces engaged the target compound with a precision airstrike, destroying a building and killing the militants inside,” it said.
PHOTO: AFP
The defence ministry said that 12 rebels including two of their commanders, Mullah Dastagir and Mullah Baz Mohammad, were killed in the operation.
Taliban spokesmen were not available to confirm the incident. Because of the remoteness of the area, it is difficult to verify claimed death tolls independently.
Both the US and Afghan defence ministry statement said that the dead militants were involved in an ambush against Afghan forces in November last year in the region that left 13 Afghan soldiers dead.
Meanwhile, General Mohaiyodin Ghori, an Afghan army commander in the southern region, said his troops backed by NATO forces killed eight militants in Nad Ali district of southern Helmand Province on Sunday.
The clash took place in the Khoshal area of the district after the joint patrol of Afghan and NATO forces received fire from militants in the area, he said.
The bodies of the militants along with their weapons were left behind on the battlefield, Ghori said, adding that there were no casualties among the combined forces.
The incident in Helmand Province happened on the same day that NATO announced the deaths of two of its soldiers, who were killed in two separate military actions in the southern region.
The militants have steadily gained power and extended their writ to larger swathes of the country in the past three years. They turned last year into the bloodiest year since 2001.
More than 5,000 people — mostly insurgents, but including nearly 300 international soldiers — were killed in conflict last year.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS