BBC News – Deadly attack at US base in Khost, eastern Afghanistan

Thursday, 26 December 2012. A suicide car bomber has killed at least three Afghan civilians near a US military base in the south-eastern Afghan city of Khost, police say.

They say the attacker drove a minibus packed with explosives towards Camp Chapman, but the vehicle exploded near the entrance as guards opened fire.

There were no coalition casualties, but six Afghans including three guards and three passers-by were injured.

In a statement, the Taliban said they carried out the attack.

Khost, which borders the volatile Pakistani region of Waziristan, has recently seen a dramatic rise in violence.

In October, a suicide bomber killed at least 20 people, three of them Nato soldiers, in the city.

In June, a suicide bomber killed 21 people – including three US troops and a local interpreter.

The Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network regularly mounts large-scale attacks and suicide bombings in the area.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20842844

Dawn – Taliban polio ban puts 240,000 Pakistan children at risk

Peshawar, 14 July 2012. A Taliban ban on polio vaccinations will put 240,000 children at risk in troubled northwest Pakistan if an inoculation campaign cannot start next week, officials warned on Friday.

Local Taliban and Pakistani warlord Hafiz Gul Bahadur, whose followers are fighting Western troops in Afghanistan, have banned polio vaccinations in the northwestern tribal region of Waziristan to protest against US drone attacks.

They have condemned the immunisation campaign, which is slated to begin on Monday, as a cover for espionage.

“There is a possibility that we may have to skip the polio campaign in North and South Waziristan because we are not getting clearance from the army nor is the situation conducive,” a government health official told AFP.

“We have threats from the Taliban. Going to these areas for a polio campaign would be tantamount to putting the lives of our staff in jeopardy,” added the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi was jailed for 33 years in May after helping the CIA find Osama bin Laden using a hepatitis vaccination programme as cover.

Fawad Khan, director of health services in the tribal belt, told AFP that at least 160,000 children in North Waziristan and 80,000 in South Waziristan would be affected if polio drops are not administered.

Talks are ongoing between administrators and the Taliban, but health workers had “not yet received the green light” for going ahead in Waziristan, he added.

But a senior security official said tribal elders would on Monday discuss how to launch the campaign.

In South Waziristan, where the army fought local Taliban in 2009, the official said “it should not be difficult” to vaccinate children “at least in areas where displaced persons have returned”.

The Lancet medical journal has said vaccination problems led last year to Pakistan’s highest number of polio cases in a decade, 198, compared to 144 in 2010.

Polio remains endemic only in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.

The highly infectious disease affects mainly the under-fives and can cause paralysis in a matter of hours. Some cases can be
fatal.

http://dawn.com/2012/07/14/taliban-polio-ban-puts-240000-pakistan-children-at-risk/

Dawn – US warns running out of patience with Pakistan

Kabul, 8 June 2012. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta warned Pakistan on Thursday that Washington is losing patience over its failure to eliminate safe havens for insurgents who attack US troops in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Panetta lashed out at Pakistan and the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network during a brief visit to Kabul overshadowed by fury over a Nato air strike that allegedly killed 18 civilians, an issue that the Pentagon chief did not address in public.

Panetta left Kabul less than five hours after his arrival, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai pledged to cut short a trip to Beijing and head home over the deaths of around 40 civilians Wednesday in the air strike and a suicide bombing.

“Even though we are seeing an uptick in violence in recent days, the overall level of violence is down from past years,” said Panetta, who is assessing plans to withdraw US combat troops by the end of 2014.

The Haqqani group, a faction linked to the Taliban and al Qaeda that is believed to be based in Pakistan’s lawless tribal district of North Waziristan, is blamed for some of the deadliest attacks in Afghanistan’s 10-year war.

“It’s an increasing concern that this safe haven exists and that there are those like the Haqqanis who are making use of that to attack our forces,” Panetta told a news conference with his Afghan counterpart, Abdul Rahim Wardak.

“We are reaching the limits of our patience here,” he said.

“For that reason, it’s extremely important that Pakistan take action to prevent this kind of safe haven,” he said.

“We have made that very clear time and time again and we will continue to do that. But as I said, we are reaching the limits of our patience,” he added.

The Afghan and US governments have suggested the war in Afghanistan cannot be won unless safe havens in Pakistan are dismantled.

Analysts say Islamabad allows the Haqqanis to operate to hedge against any influence by their arch-foe India in Afghanistan, while critics in Pakistan accuse the Americans of deflecting blame for the increasingly deadly war.

The Pentagon chief said the Haqqani network was to blame for an attack last week on Forward Operating Base Salerno in eastern Afghanistan.

US military chief General Martin Dempsey, asked about Panetta’s remarks, said the strong words on Pakistan were largely because the Haqqani network was more active in eastern Afghanistan, where the transition from Nato forces is expected to be particularly difficult.

Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in Washington that he shared Panetta’s frustration but acknowledged that Pakistani forces were fighting militants on parts of their own soil.

“Make no mistake about it: Although we are extraordinarily dissatisfied with the effect that Pakistan has had on the Haqqanis, we are also mindful that they are conducting military operations – at great loss, by the way,” he said.

The United States leads 130,000 Nato troops fighting the Taliban insurgency and is planning to withdraw the bulk of combat forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, and hand responsibility for security to the Afghans.

But civilian casualties caused by US and Nato air strikes have been a frequent source of tension between Karzai and the United States.

The Afghan president, who was attending a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Beijing, issued a stinging rebuke of Nato’s latest air strike.

“Attacks by Nato that cause life and property losses to civilians under no circumstances could be justified and are not acceptable,” Karzai said of the incident on Wednesday in Logar province, south of Kabul.

Karzai “will shorten his trip to China and will very soon return to the country” following the deaths in Logar and those from a Kandahar suicide bombing on the same day, his office said.

Nato’s US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said “multiple insurgents” were killed in the air strike, which was ordered after troops came under fire during an operation against a Taliban commander.

Local police said that 18 civilians, including women and children, were killed in the strike. Dempsey promised an investigation.

The air strike did not come up in Thursday’s talks between Panetta and Wardak, a senior US defence official told AFP.

For the past five years the number of civilians killed in the war has risen steadily, reaching a record of 3,021 in 2011, with the vast majority caused by insurgents, the United Nations says.

In Kandahar on Wednesday, 23 civilians were killed when two Taliban bombers blew themselves up at a makeshift bazaar and truck stop near a major Nato base.

Panetta’s stop in Kabul came at the end of a nine-day tour with stops in Singapore, Vietnam and India, in which he touted a US strategic shift toward Asia after a decade of war.

http://dawn.com/2012/06/08/us-warns-running-out-of-patience-with-pakistan/

BBC News – Swiss pair free after Taliban ordeal, Pakistan army says

Thursday, 15 March 2012. A Swiss couple held hostage by the Pakistani Taliban are free after an eight-month ordeal, the army says.

The man and woman were kidnapped last July in Balochistan province.

They turned up at a military checkpoint in the North Waziristan tribal region near the Afghan border on Thursday, the army says.

Unconfirmed reports say the pair may have escaped from their captors, but it is not clear if a ransom was paid or if they were part of a prisoner swap.

Swiss Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter insisted that his country did not pay a ransom to secure their release. He told a news conference that the couple fled from their captors.

Mr Burkhalter said that he had spoken to them by telephone in a “very emotional” conversation.

The couple reported this morning at a military checkpoint in Tull area, just on the border with North Waziristan, Pakistan’s military said.

Officials said they had to be given medical treatment when they first arrived.

But the pair appeared to be in good health and smiled and waved as they walked out of the military helicopter that transported them to Peshawar and then Islamabad.

The couple say they were abducted while travelling in a camper van from India to Switzerland.

Military spokesman Athar Abbas told the BBC that the pair were now in Islamabad and would be handed over to the Swiss mission through the Pakistani foreign office after paperwork had been completed.

“Our people in Peshawar say the couple told them they escaped from Taliban captivity,” General Abbas said.

“I am not aware of their detailed account and therefore cannot say where in North Waziristan they were kept, or how far they had to walk before arriving at our checkpoint.”

The couple – Daniela Widmer, 29, and Olivier David Och, 31 – were last seen pleading for their lives in a militant video released in October.

They were abducted by unidentified gunmen from the Loralai area of Balochistan – close to the border with South Waziristan – in July last year.

It is reported they were travelling by road from the town of Dera Ghazi Khan in Punjab province to the Balochistan capital, Quetta.

They were then taken to South Waziristan before finally emerging on Thursday at the checkpoint on the outskirts of the town of Tull – close to the North Waziristan border with the Kurram tribal area.

The BBC’s M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad says that the Taliban and criminal gangs demanding ransoms in north-west Pakistan are often interchangeable.

Our correspondent says the Taliban are able to raise significant funding for their militant activities by collecting ransom money for kidnapped foreigners, who also provide their captives with leverage to make prisoner-exchange demands.

Such revenue is becoming all the more important to militants now that al-Qaeda funding in the region is beginning to dry up, our correspondent says.

Since 2004, there have been more than a dozen incidents in which one or more foreigners have been kidnapped in Pakistan.

One of the more high profile incidents is that of 70-year-old US aid expert Warren Weinstein, who was kidnapped by armed men – believed to be from al-Qaeda – in Lahore nearly four months ago.

Soon after the Swiss couple’s abduction, a Taliban spokesman said they were in their custody and would be released if the American government freed Afia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman jailed in the US for attempting to kill US officials in Afghanistan.

The Taliban later also demanded the release of other Afghan prisoners in US custody.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17379324

BBC News – UK terror suspects ‘die’ in US drone strike in Pakistan

18 November 2011

The Foreign Office is investigating reports that two UK terror suspects died in a US drone strike in Pakistan.

Ibrahim Adam, 24, and Mohammed Azmir, 37, both from east London, are said to have been killed in Waziristan on the Afghanistan border.

Mr Adam’s father confirmed his son had been killed by a US unmanned aircraft.

A Foreign Office spokesman could not confirm the deaths but said: “We are aware of reports and are looking into them further.”

Mr Adam, from Barkingside, had been on the run from the UK authorities since absconding from a control order in May 2007.

His brother, Anthony Garcia, was jailed for life in April 2007 for his part in a fertiliser bomb plot in the UK.

Mr Adam was made subject to a control order after being stopped on the way to Syria.

British authorities said he was planning to travel to Iraq or Afghanistan for jihadist training or to fight Western forces.

Mr Azmir, a father of three, who was born in Sheffield and lived in Ilford, was made subject to a Treasury order freezing his assets in February 2010.

He is not currently on the Treasury’s list of people and organisations subject to financial sanctions.

It is believed that Mr Azmir’s brother, Abdul Jabbar, 32, was killed in an earlier American drone attack in Pakistan in September last year.

An Azmir family friend, who did not want to be named, said: “They have taken it very badly. This is the second son who has been killed in a drone strike.”

The Home Office declined to comment.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15796571