Taliban

KABUL, Afghanistan - U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Afghan President Hamid Karzai said yesterday that the Taliban pose no threat to the security of Afghanistan, despite news of a fresh attack on aid workers attributed to remnants of the fundamentalist regime. "I've not seen any indication that the Taliban pose any military threat to the security of Afghanistan," said Rumsfeld, addressing reporters alongside Karzai after his sixth visit to Afghanistan in the two years since the Taliban regime was toppled.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Residents have discovered three mass graves near the town of Bamian in the rugged Hindu Kush Mountains, at a site near where the Taliban and opposition Northern Alliance forces frequently clashed, United Nations officials said yesterday. Afghans in the area say the graves are filled with civilians, ethnic Hazara killed by the Taliban just before the regime's collapse in December. The Taliban, mostly Pashtuns and militant followers of the Sunni branch of Islam, were accused several times in recent years of revenge killings of the Shiite Hazaras in the Bamian province.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The self-proclaimed Taliban spokesman, known for changing his phone number weekly and making wild claims about purported Taliban attacks, has been arrested in Pakistan, officials said. Mullah Hakim Latifi, who has served as a roving one-man Taliban press secretary for almost two years, was captured in Baluchistan province, just over the border from southern Afghanistan, Pakistan government spokesman Sheik Rashid Ahmed told reporters in Islamabad. "It is a big success," Ahmed told the Associated Press.

A year after the Taliban fell to an American-led coalition, a group of NATO ambassadors landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, to survey what appeared to be a triumph - a fresh start for a country ripped apart by years of war with the Soviets and brutal repression by religious extremists. With a senior American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, leading the way, they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters with little fear for their safety. They strolled quiet streets in Kandahar and sipped tea with tribal leaders.

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- Taliban kidnappers freed two South Korean female hostages yesterday, a move the fundamentalist militants described as a gesture of good will while they negotiate the fate of the 19 other Christian aid workers they still hold. The two women were released into the custody of Afghan elders and then handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross in a rural roadside exchange just west of Ghazni province, where they were abducted while traveling with a group of 23 South Korean volunteers July 19. The Taliban have killed two male hostages, including the leader of the church group.

NEW DELHI, India -- Three months after the Taliban movement appeared on the threshold of imposing its militant form of Islamic rule on the last parts of Afghanistan, a sharp reversal of fortune has seen Taliban forces taking heavy casualties and falling back in disarray to a battle front just north of the capital, Kabul.The front line between the Taliban and the forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a more moderate Muslim leader long regarded as Afghanistan's wiliest military commander, now lies 10 to 15 miles north of Kabul at the nearest point.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- In one of the most serious attacks on the Afghan police since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, suspected Taliban insurgents killed 18 police officers Monday along a notorious drug-smuggling route in southern Afghanistan. The suspected insurgents ambushed a police convoy in Helmand province near the Pakistani border, prompting a seven- to eight-hour firefight Monday evening, said Muhammad Ayub, the province's deputy police chief. The victims included a regional police chief, he said.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Suspected Taliban fighters killed at least seven people and wounded two in a bold attack early yesterday on a government district office in the southern Afghan province of Zabul, local security officials said. An American soldier was wounded in a separate attack yesterday when gunmen opened fire on a Special Forces unit training the Afghan National Army on a firing range on the edge of Kabul, the capital. NATO peacekeepers in Kabul captured a man suspected of being one of the three gunmen, said a spokesman for the U.S. military at Bagram Air Base.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Thousands of frightened villagers fled a district in southern Afghanistan that was overrun by Taliban fighters, as NATO and Afghan forces flew in hundreds of reinforcements yesterday to confront the insurgents. About 700 Afghan troops were airlifted to the main coalition base outside Kandahar after Taliban fighters moved into nearly a dozen villages in the strategic Arghandab district, a fertile swath of land 10 miles northwest of Kandahar. Canadian troops, who have the primary responsibility for securing Kandahar and its environs, were also repositioning themselves in response to the developments, said NATO spokesman Mark Laity.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -Taliban forces consolidated control of two northwestern Pakistan districts and sent patrols into a third Thursday, stepping up their defiance of a government peace deal and raising fears of further advances by violent Islamists who have now come within 60 miles of this capital city. Officials reacted with only mild concern, saying the Taliban should comply with their pledge to lay down arms but the peace deal should be given a chance. The national security adviser, Rehman Malik, said security had actually "improved" in the past two weeks but force would be "the only option" if the militants do not halt violence.