War News for Friday, December 21, 2011

NATO is reporting the death of an ISAF soldier from an IED attack in an undisclosed location in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, January 20th.


Bodies formed to manage Afghan refugees in Pakistan

Afghan Political Crisis Grows as Legislators Vow to Defy Karzai and Open Parliament


Reported security incidents

Kirkuk:
#1: Security forces found on Friday two explosive charges planted near houses in west of Kirkuk, a security source said. “Policemen found the two bombs planted near houses in al-Dabs district, west of Kirkuk,” the source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.



Afghanistan: "The Forgotten War"
#1-3: Militants have set fire to at least four trucks carrying fuel supplies for US-led troops in Afghanistan in separate incidents in southwestern Pakistan.

#1: The first incident happened in Qalat town, 160 kilometers south of Quetta, on Friday. "Three men riding a motorcycle intercepted the three tankers, threw petrol and set them on fire," local police official Lal Jan told AFP.

#2: In the second attack, two men torched another oil tanker of US-led troops in Mastung district, 40 kilometers south of Quetta, Jan added. According to the local officials, there was no loss of lives in the two incidents.

#3: In the third incident in Wadh town, 370 kilometers south of Quetta, gunmen opened fire on a US-led troops' truck carrying fuel. The truck driver and his assistant were wounded in the attack.

#4: A bomb on Friday killed two guards assigned to protect a provincial leader in southern Afghanistan. Amanullah Hotak, the head of the provincial council in Uruzgan province, said the remote-controlled bomb attached to a bicycle was detonated as his vehicle traveled past it. He said he escaped injury, but that two other body guards were injured in the blast. The incident occurred in Dihrawud district, a dangerous area in the south of the province.

#5: More than 10 Taliban have been killed during a 2-day operation in the northern Faryab province of Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a press release on Thursday. The press release said the ISAF-Afghan combined forces had launched military operations against Taliban in Khwaja Kinti village in Qaisar district of Faryab province on Tuesday and Wednesday, adding more than 10 Taliban were gunned down in the operations. The press release did not say anything about casualties to the combined forces.

#6: Meanwhile, the Taliban Thursday claimed to have killed four drivers, besides damaging three vehicles of a logistic convoy of the foreign forces in an attack in Andar district of Ghazni province. The Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) their fighters attacked a logistic convoy of the foreign forces in Abu Kala area of Andar district early today, leaving its four drivers dead and three guards injured. He said three vehicles of the convoy were also destroyed in the attack. The Andar District Chief Sher Khan Yousafzai, when contacted by the AIP, confirmed the attack, and said one vehicle of the logistic convoy was torched in the incident. He rejected the Taliban spokesman’s claims regarding casualties and told AIP the drivers and guards of the convoy did not suffer casualties in the incident.

#7: Six people were killed Thursday when suspected Taliban militants ambushed a convoy of a Hungarian oil company in Pakistan's northwestern region, security officials said. The incident took place in the Kohat district of the militancy-plagued northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Khalid Omarzai, the top civil administrator in Kohat, told DPA by phone that four employees of the Hungarian oil company, MOLE, were travelling from Kohat to Peshawar, the provincial capital, when an unknown number of attackers struck. "One driver and one labourer from the MOLE company were killed while ... two engineers were abducted," said Omarzai. The soldiers from paramilitary Frontier Corpse chased the attackers and, during an exchange of fire, four troops were killed. The two abducted engineers were Pakistani nationals. An intelligence official, however, said that the four soldiers were killed during the ambush, not during a chase. "There were two vehicles in the convoy. One was carrying the oil company employees and the other the FC soldiers. The attackers attacked both. There was no chase," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.


DoD: Spc. Joshua T. Lancaster