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Sunday, July 22, 2007

[wvns] Taliban hostages' fate in dispute

Fate of Taliban hostages in dispute
By JASON STRAZIUSO
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070721/ap_on_re_as/afghan_kidnappings


KABUL, Afghanistan - A purported Taliban spokesman said Saturday that
the Islamic militia had killed two German hostages, a claim disputed
by both Afghanistan and Germany. He also offered to trade 23 captive
South Koreans for imprisoned Taliban fighters.

The militant spokesman offered no proof of his claim on the kidnapped
Germans. Afghan officials said one of the Germans appeared to have
died from a heart attack, while the other was still alive.

"Everything indicates he was a victim of the stress of the
kidnapping," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in
Berlin.

Despite the competing claims, the separate seizures of the foreigners
in southern provinces were vivid illustrations of the lack of
government control over the region.

Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, who claims to speak for the Taliban, said the
Afghan and South Korean governments had until Sunday evening to agree
to release 23 Taliban militants or the Korean hostages would be killed.

"If the government of Afghanistan and the government of Korea are
asking for the release of their hostages, then we believe the Taliban
also have the right to ask for the release of their prisoners who are
spending time in Afghan jails," Ahmadi told The Associated Press by
satellite phone from an undisclosed location.

It is not clear that Afghanistan would agree to such a deal. In March,
President Hamid Karzai authorized the release of five Taliban
prisoners in exchange for a kidnapped Italian reporter, but he called
the trade a one-time deal. Karzai was also criticized by the United
States and European nations who felt that trade would encourage more
kidnappings.

Ahmadi claimed the Germans and five Afghans kidnapped along with them
were shot to death because Germany did not withdraw its 3,000 troops
from Afghanistan as demanded by the Taliban. The seven were kidnapped
Wednesday in the southern province of Wardak while working on a dam
project.

The Afghan government said it had information to the contrary.

"The information that we and our security forces have is that one of
these two who were kidnapped died of a heart attack," Foreign Ministry
spokesman Sultan Ahmad Baheen said. "The second hostage is alive, and
we hope that he will be released soon, and we are trying our best to
get him released."

He did not reveal the source of the information or say anything about
the Afghan hostages.

The South Koreans were kidnapped at gunpoint from a bus Thursday in
Ghazni province as they traveled on the main highway from Kabul to the
southern city of Kandahar. It was the largest-scale abduction of
foreigners since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.

The Taliban roam freely through large swaths of southern Afghanistan.
The South Koreans' bus was stopped on Highway 1, a road known to be
risky, particularly Ghazni and Zabul provinces where the government
has little control.

Ahmadi initially said there were 18 South Korean hostages, but later
revised the figure to 23, saying several Koreans spoke Dari and Pashtu
and had been mistaken for Afghans. Ahmadi also initially said the
kidnapped Koreans, including 18 women, would be killed Saturday if
South Korea didn't withdraw its 200 troops. Late Saturday he changed
that demand.

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun urged the Taliban to "send our
people home quickly and safely." Roh also spoke with Karzai and asked
for his cooperation to quickly win the hostages' release.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, himself a South Korean, also
called Karzai and expressed "grave concern" over the abductions.

It was unclear what the Koreans were doing in Afghanistan. The Yonhap
news agency reported that most were members of the Saemmul Community
Church in Bundang, just south of Seoul. A year ago, hundreds of South
Korean Christians were ordered to leave Afghanistan amid rumors they
were proselytizing in the deeply conservative Islamic nation.

Ahmadi warned the Afghan government and U.S. and NATO forces not to
try to rescue the hostages or they would be killed.

"We have surrounded the area but are working very carefully. We don't
want them to be killed," said Ali Shah Ahmadzai, the provincial police
chief in Ghazni.

German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Jeager, meanwhile, said a
crisis team was pursuing "every clue" and was in close contact with
the Afghan government.

Germany has 3,000 soldiers in NATO's International Security Assistance
Force who are stationed in the mostly peaceful northern part of
Afghanistan. South Korea's 200 soldiers in the U.S.-led coalition
largely work on humanitarian projects, such as medical assistance and
reconstruction.

In South Korea, family members of kidnapped victims urged the
government to accept Taliban trade, noting Seoul had already decided
to bring its soldiers home this year.

"We hope that the immediate withdrawal (of troops) is made," Cha
Sung-min, a relative of one of the hostages, told reporters.


Associated Press reporter Kwang-tae Kim contributed to this report
from Seoul, South Korea.

===

Up to 80 Civilians Dead" After US Air Strikes in Afghanistan
Jason Burke
The Observer UK
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/070107A.shtml


Witnesses claim a village in British-run Helmand was bombed for three
hours after the Taliban attempted to ambush a US-Afghan army convoy.
Air strikes in the British-controlled Helmand province of
Afghanistan may have killed civilians, coalition troops said yesterday
as local people claimed that between 50 and 80 people, many of them
women and children, had died.

In the latest of a series of attacks causing significant civilian
casualties in recent weeks, more than 200 were killed by coalition
troops in Afghanistan in June, far more than are believed to have been
killed by Taliban militants.

The bombardment, which witnesses said lasted up to three hours, in
the Gereshk district late on Friday followed an attempted ambush by
the Taliban on a joint US-Afghan military convoy. According to
Mohammad Hussein, the provincial police chief, the militants fled into
a nearby village for cover. Planes then targeted the village of
Hyderabad. Mohammad Khan, a resident of the village, said seven
members of his family, including his brother and five of his brother's
children, were killed.

'I brought three of my wounded relatives to Gereshk hospital for
treatment,' he told the Associated Press news agency by phone. The
villagers were yesterday burying a 'lot of dead bodies', Khan said.

He spoke as American forces in Iraq also found themselves heavily
criticised over civilian deaths when eight people died, apparently
caught in crossfire from a gunfight between insurgents and soldiers in
Baghdad's Sadr City yesterday. But residents, police and hospital
officials said eight civilians were killed in their homes and angrily
accused US forces of firing blindly on innocent people. Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki condemned the raids and demanded an explanation for
the assault on a district where he has barred American operations in
the past.

In Afghanistan, the civilian deaths caused by US and Nato-led
troops have infuriated local people and prompted President Hamid
Karzai to publicly condemn foreign forces for careless 'use of extreme
force' and for viewing Afghan lives as 'cheap'. The increasingly
fragile President has urged restraint and better co-ordination of
military operations with the Afghan government, while also blaming the
Taliban for using civilians as human shields.

Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, raised the
issue of civilian casualties on a four-hour visit to Afghanistan on
Friday on which he met the senior Nato commander there, the American
General Dan McNeill.

Senior British soldiers have previously expressed concerns that
McNeill, who took command of the 32,000 Nato troops in Afghanistan
only recently, was 'a fan' of the massive use of air power to defeat
insurgents and that his favoured tactics could be counter-productive.

'Every civilian dead means five new Taliban,' said one British
officer who has recently returned from Helmand. 'It's a tough call
when the enemy are hiding in villages, but you have to be very, very
careful,' he added.

The American general has been dubbed 'Bomber McNeill' by his critics.

But Nato has 'never killed and will never intentionally kill
innocent civilians', its secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer,
told a conference in Macedonia on Friday. 'The majority of civilian
casualties in Afghanistan have been caused by Taliban suicide bombs
and roadside bombs.'

US Air Force Major John Thomas said that, after a long skirmish
and under constant fire from the Taliban, troops of Isaf (the
International Security Assistance Force), called for close air force
support during an operation in Helmand, where the Taliban have been
resurgent this year.

'All enemy positions were destroyed, but after friendly forces
surveyed the area, there were reports of some possible civilian
deaths,' Thomas said.

'The remains of some people who appeared to be civilians were
found among enemy fighters in a trench line,' he added. The level of
violence has soared in Afghanistan, with more than 2,800 people -
mostly Taliban fighters - killed in fighting this year, according to
an Associated Press tally of figures issued in the last few days by
Western military and Afghan officials.

A count by the United Nations and an umbrella organisation of
Afghan and international aid groups shows the number of civilians
killed by international forces was slightly greater than the number
killed by insurgents in the first half of the year.

In Helmand's Sangin district, Nato-led and Afghan troops clashed
with Taliban fighters on Friday, leaving 15 of the militants dead,
said Ezatullah Khan, a district chief. Helmand is the primary area of
operations for the British troops deployed in Afghanistan.

There were no casualties among Nato and Afghan troops, the
official said.

More than 3,000 British troops have been deployed in Helmand to
combat both the Taliban and the drugs trade. Also in the south, two
suspected Taliban members were killed while trying to place a homemade
bomb on the side of a road in Zhari district of Kandahar province on
Friday, said Ghulam Rasool, the district's police chief.

Three children were also killed on Friday and another wounded when
an old rocket they were playing with exploded in Zabul province in the
south, said General Yaqoub Khan, the provincial police chief.

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