Five civilians, including three children, were killed and 24 other people were wounded in three separate attacks by Taliban militants in southern and eastern Afghanistan yesterday, officials said.
A rocket hit house early in the morning in Behsud district of eastern Nangarhar Province, killing two children while wounding three women and one man, an interior ministry statement said.
The ministry blamed the attack on “enemies of the people of Afghanistan” — a term often used to refer to the Taliban insurgents.
Meanwhile, a bomb blast near a bank branch in Lashkar Gah, the capital of southern Helmand Province, killed three civilians and wounded 15 others, provincial spokesman Daud Ahmadi said.
Minutes later a second bomb exploded close to a high school in Lashkar Gah and injured three more children, an adult and a policeman, Ahmadi said.
Violence in Afghanistan has continued to increase in recent months, as has the use of improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a new report.
Ban’s latest quarterly report to the 15-nation UN Security Council, released on Saturday, confirmed what NATO powers fighting in Afghanistan have suggested — that the country is increasingly dangerous nearly nine years after a US-led invasion toppled the Taliban government.
“The overall security situation has not improved,” said the report, which was posted on the UN Security Council Web site.
The “alarming trend of increased improvised explosive device incidents and the occurrence of complex suicide attacks persisted,” it said. “Military operations also intensified.”
Most of the security incidents in recent months have involved armed clashes and improvised roadside explosives, which have proven ralespecially deadly in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the report said.
“The rise in incidents involving improvised explosive devices constitutes an alarming trend, with the first four months of 2010 recording a 94 percent increase compared to the same period in 2009,” it said.
There have been some three suicide attacks per week, half of them in the south of the country, it said.
There are also an average of two more complex suicide attacks per month — bigger operations involving more assailants — double the average for last year, it said.
“The shift to more complex suicide attacks demonstrates a growing capability of the local terrorist networks linked to al-Qaeda,” it said.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS