Daily News Channel
No running water, no electricity, no fuel and little food. International Red Cross officials are “gravely concerned” about the stark situation in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, where a monthlong offensive against the Taliban has displaced more than 2 million civilians.
Twenty-five militants and six soldiers were killed Saturday night in two separate clashes between security forces and insurgents in Pakistan’s tribal region, officials said. Both clashes took place after militants ambushed security forces in South Waziristan, one of seven districts in Pakistan’s mostly ungoverned tribal region along the Afghan border, said military spokesman Gen. Athar Abbas.
The death toll climbed to 15 in the wake of a series of explosions that rocked northwest Pakistan on Thursday, officials announced Friday. The attacks shook Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, where government forces have waged a massive operation against Taliban militants
Back-to-back explosions shook two markets in Peshawar, Pakistan, on Thursday evening, killing two civilians and wounding 70 others, an official from the deputy police superintendent’s office said. Another official, Sahib Zada Muhammad Anis Khan, the district coordination officer for Peshawar District, told CNN the blasts took place in the center of the city at adjacent markets: Qissa Khawani Bazaar and Kabari Bazaar.
The Taliban claimed responsibility Thursday for a deadly suicide attack on a police building in Lahore, eastern Pakistan that killed at least 27 — and vowed similar attacks in other cities.
The Pentagon is considering new tactics in Afghanistan: deploying hundreds of troops using creative and nimble counterinsurgency techniques to fight the Taliban, a U.S. military source told CNN. The change is based on a plan used in Iraq by Lt.
Sebastian Junger found him crouched on a battlefield in Afghanistan, fighting to stay alive. The Taliban had the man cornered and outnumbered.
The Pakistani Taliban says it wants to return to a peace deal that recently collapsed, sparking an ongoing massive military operation, a spokesman said Tuesday. Taliban militants in Swat Valley have announced that they are willing to disarm if the government allows sharia, or Islamic law, to be implemented in the region, a spokesman for Taliban mediator Sufi Mohammed said.
There are large-scale civilian deaths in Afghanistan that make headlines, and then there are the small incidents that are barely noticed at all. That was the fate of 12-year-old Benafsha Shaheem. On May 3, she was traveling with family members from her village in western Farah province to a wedding party in the neighboring province of Herat.
Unregistered churches are attracting millions of worshippers in China exposing an enduring rift between the government and the Vatican. Those who have fled tell of the whole valley being turned into a battlefield as citizens run away, many of them with no shoes and some elderly. They fall ill from sun and heat exposure — particularly infants and those already weak and sick — as they flee.