A wave of clashes in Afghanistan killed more than 70 people on Friday, including 18 policemen and four Canadian soldiers, officials said.
The growing unrest has led Washington to deploy 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, due in the coming weeks, in a move a NATO general said would trigger more violence but would help improve security in the longer run.
The four Canadians, part of the international assistance force, were killed in two separate explosions that also killed an interpreter and injured eight soldiers and an Afghan national, the Canadian military said.
PHOTO: AFP
The first incident happened at 6:45am local time, Brigadier-General Jon Vance, the Canadian commander in Kandahar, said in an address televised in Canada from a base in southern Afghanistan.
“Two Canadian soldiers were killed and five wounded when an improvised explosive device detonated in the vicinity of their dismounted patrol in Zari district, 40km west of Kandahar City,” he said.
A local interpreter was also killed during this attack. Another Afghan national was injured.
The second blast occurred two hours later, killing two more Canadian soldiers and wounding three. Their vehicle struck a roadside bomb about 20km northeast of Kandahar City, Vance said.
Nine of the policemen were killed along with a district chief in a clash on Friday with Taliban in the northern province of Jawzjan, an unusual battlefield for the extremists, who focus on southern and eastern Afghanistan.
“Today in a clash between Taliban and police, the district chief and nine police were killed,” provincial police chief Khalil Aminzada said.
The fighting was in a district called Koshtipa, on the border with Turkmenistan, he said.
Nine other policemen were killed and three wounded in the southwestern province of Farah when a mob of Taliban attacked them, provincial governor Rohul Amin said. Six of the attackers also died in the fighting, he said.
The clash followed fighting earlier in the day when Afghan and US-led troops were called in after intelligence was received of a plan to attack the governor’s home, Amin said. Seven Taliban were killed in that exchange, he said.
Elsewhere in Farah on Friday, a suicide bomber blew up a bomb-filled police vehicle, killing one policeman and wounding two, the governor said. The vehicle had previously been stolen by the insurgents.
The US military also announced on Friday that six more alleged insurgents were killed in operations in Kunar, Logar and Helmand provinces.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
RSS