Times of India reports the Taliban claim to halted have a major opposition offensive near Mazar, inflicting 35 dead. The Taliban also claim that 95 US personnel have been killed to date; the US admits to no deaths.
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11/05/2001 ||
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IRNA reports that Taliban foreign minister Mutawakil challenges George Bush and Tony Blair to meet Mullah Omar one (or two) on one for a gunfight with Kalashnikovs.
Taliban Foreign Minister Maulvi Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil has proposed one-to-one fight between President Bush, Prime minister Tony Blair and Taliban leader Mulla Mohammad Omar to determine as to who stand and who will run in the fight. "The Americans have launched propaganda that Mulla Omar has gone in hiding, so I will propose that Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush should take lashnikovs and come to a specified place where Mulla Omar will appear with the Klashnikov to determine as to who will run," he said.
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Afghanistanâs Taleban regime said yesterday it was ready for decades of war as it fought a new opposition drive, backed by "cowardly" US airstrikes, toward the key northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. At the same time, the military commander of the opposition forces said his troops were ready to march on the capital Kabul, although on the ground the anti-Taleban army looked far from ready for a major push.
And while the United States pressed its nearly month-old air offensive, there were few signs of progress in its drive to root out the terrorists behind the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. "We are ready for a long war and we hope to defeat the United States, which the rest of world calls a superpower," Taleban Education Minister and spokesman Amir Khan Muttaqi told reporters here. "The US should revise its wrong, terrorist policies, otherwise this war, which may last for decades, will burn many Americans and Afghans."
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11/05/2001 ||
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The Times of India also reports a US attack on a hotel and vehicles used by Taliban fighters that littered the streets with wreckage and body parts.
"In Kabul, the sound of helicopters was heard before the rockets slammed into the hotel, which housed Taliban fighters, just before dawn. That would mark a change in U.S. tactics from using high-flying jets. "We don't know about deaths, but some Taliban have been wounded and one part of the hotel has been damaged," said Abdul Hanan Himat, an information ministry spokesman in Kabul. Witnesses saw pieces of bodies and blood after the attack.
"Himat said 15 civilians were killed overnight and 22 wounded by U.S. bombing in the Daman district of the southern city of Kandahar and in the Keshendeh area in the south of the northern province of Balkh."
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11/05/2001 ||
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A former deputy prime minister under exiled Afghan King Zahir Shah was in Islamabad for talks on the post-Taliban government. Abdus Samad Hamid, 65, who served as deputy prime minister during the reign of former Afghan king Mohammed Zahir Shah, arrived on Saturday to take part in discussions on the creation of a new broad-based government in Kabul.
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11/05/2001 ||
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The CIA is said to be recruiting former Khad (secret police) agents from the Communist Najibullah regime for operations against the Taliban.
"While United States is facing sheer disappointment in its military campaign against Afghanistan and in its efforts to dismantle the Taliban government, Central Intelligence Agency has already started recruitment of ex Khad agents who have served during the period of Dr. Najibullah in Afghanistan to achieve the objective of dismantling Taliban regime.Reliable sources have told the PNS that US after the killing of Abdul Haq by Taliban forces, have now started preparing Shahnawaz Tanai for a leading role against the Taliban. Tanai has served as a Chief of the Khad Intelligence Network and Defence Minister during the period of former President of Afghanistan Dr. Najibullah." Sounds like a reasonable move to me. Keeps them off the street and it helps the war effort.
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11/05/2001 ||
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Novosti reports that about 3000 mercenaries, a mix of Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens, have joined the Taliban forces.
As the newspaper notes, despite Islamabad's assurances of having closed the border with Afghanistan, the mercenaries managed to cross it using the mountainous locality. "They appeared in Kabul two or three days ago and are crossing the border in groups every day", The Washington Post quotes Nadir Shah, the Northern Alliance field commander in the Dernam region, as saying. According to him, the composition of the mercenaries' ranks is "mixed - the Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens, but most of them are Pakistanis."
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Noam Chomsky, speaking in India, described the US-led attacks on Afghanistan as a "silent genocide", affecting millions of innocent civilians.
According to the Statesman, an English daily published from New Delhi, Chomsky in his clearest voice of dissent in contemporary America described the US-led attacks on Afghanistan as a "silent genocide", affecting millions of innocent civilians. "They are not the Taliban," he told an overflowing audience at the Fifth D.T.Lakdawala Memorial Lecture on 'Peering into the Abyss of the Future' which included Indian Ministers, Diplomats, members of the academia in a 70-minute lecture at the FICCI auditorium here recently.
"Terrorism is terrorism that is directed against the US and its friends and allies," he said before reeling out a string of statistics on the misery of the Afghanistan people and US neo-imperialist policies over the decades. "For the first time in modern history, Europe and its offshoots are the targets, not the perpetrators of horrifying crimes. Europeans have spent centuries slaughtering each other, but have not been attacked by their traditional victims," the Professor of Linguistics (Not logic, and not history) said. "Seven million Afghans are facing starvation, food will be available next year only to 20 per cent of the population as the strikes have disrupted planting of crops. "But only 1 per cent of the
US people knew about the real travails of the Afghan people," he said.
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11/05/2001 ||
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Politicians and federal officials were up in arms over the Nepalese man who waltzed through Chicago airport security with an arsenal of seven knives, a stun gun and tear gas.
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11/05/2001 ||
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IRNA reports that Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf met with senior leaders of exiled prime minister Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) to win support for his policy regarding Afghanistan.
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George Jonas, writing in Canada's National Post has a very good discussion of the subject of Resentment and Hostility -- not in the sense harped upon in academia of the West having to understand the root causes of blah, blah, blah, but the other way around. Good point: Why is it incumbent upon us to please them?
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11/05/2001 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
