Bin Laden Blowback?: More Than 80 Killed in Pakistan Blasts
On Friday, a pair of suicide bombings killed more than 80 Frontier Corps trainees who were celebrating at a graduation party in Shabqadar in northwestern Pakistan The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks as a form of retaliation for the death of Osama bin Laden (more).
On Friday, a pair of suicide bombings killed more than 80 Frontier Corps trainees who were celebrating at a graduation party in Shabqadar in northwestern Pakistan. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks as a form of retaliation for the death of Osama bin Laden, but that link was questioned by Pakistani police officials later in the day. –KA
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The Taliban said the vicious double suicide bombing in Shabqadar, a trading town on the edge of the tribal belt in Charsadda district in north-western Pakistan, claimed the first part of the blood price they had promised to extract for the American killing of Bin Laden on 2 May. It was conducted with ruthless efficiency.
Abid Khan, 24, cowered in his sweetshop when he heard the first blast and then, eight minutes later, a second. Rushing to the scene, he found some 200 trainee soldiers strewn on the road among mangled vans and a pile of bags.
“It was very bad,” he said in slow, precise English. “Some people had no hand. Some people had no foot. Some heads were far away [from] the people.” He repeated himself. “It was very bad.”
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A U.S. drone strike and air assaults by Pakistani military forces killed 38 people this weekend in tribal areas near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, official sources reported Sunday.
The official American reaction to the coordinated attacks in Kabul, the Afghan capital, as well as at Jalalabad airbase, and in Paktika and Logar Provinces, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of guerrilla warfare.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has branded the Taliban’s 18-hour siege of Kabul and places across eastern Afghanistan on Sunday an intelligence failure and called for an investigation into NATO security operations.
Pointing to "the shaky, erratic and vague standpoint of the Americans" as one key reason for their decision, Taliban leaders in Afghanistan put the kibosh on plans to meet with U.S. envoys, releasing a statement on Thursday explaining the change of plans.
Claims made by NATO that Pakistan is in cahoots with the Afghan Taliban are tantamount to "old wine in an even older bottle," according to Pakistan's Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar. However, this particular batch of wine represents thousands of mandatory conversations (read: interrogations) versus Khar's official denial.
In the deadliest day for American troops since the war in Afghanistan began almost 10 years ago, 30 Americans and seven Afghan commandos died Saturday when the Chinook helicopter they were in was shot down by the Taliban.
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