Man in Afghan army uniform kills two Nato troops: ISAF

KABUL: A man wearing an Afghan army uniform on Thursday shot dead two members of Nato’s US-led International Security Assistance Force, military officials said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack which they said targeted French troops in Kapisa province, which is east of the capital Kabul.

“An individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform turned his weapon against two International Security Assistance Forces service members in eastern Afghanistan, today, killing both service members,” a coalition statement said.

ISAF said it was investigating but did not identify the nationality of the victims in line with policy.

“This morning one Afghan soldier named Ebrahim killed three French soldiers. He was also martyred,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said.

The Taliban frequently exaggerate their claims.

He said the incident took place in Tagab district in Kapisa province, which is part of the volatile east of the country.

There have been several incidents over the past year in which Afghan government security forces – or those purporting to be – have turned their weapons on foreign troops.

On Christmas eve an Afghan soldier was killed after opening fire on US troops in southwestern Farah province.

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Taliban attack kills 10 Afghan police

KANDAHAR: A Taliban bomb attack killed 10 Afghan police returning from a recruitment centre in southern Afghanistan’s restive Helmand province on Thursday, the local government said.

The victims were members of the US-funded Afghan Local Police (ALP) set up last year and touted as key to a handover of security control, which will see all foreign combat troops leave Afghanistan in theory by the end of 2014.

“Ten local police were killed and one was injured after their vehicle struck a roadside bomb in the Nad-e Ali district of Helmand province,” provincial governor’s spokesman Daud Ahmadi said.

“The police were on their way back from a recruitment centre.” Three of the ALP officers were newly recruited, he added.

The Taliban, who frequently use roadside bombs to attack Afghan and US-led Nato troops, claimed responsibility for the attack.

“Our mujahedeen fighters attacked a police vehicle and as a result 10 police were killed including a police commander,” said spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi.

Parts of Helmand remain highly unstable, although Nad-e Ali was one of the districts where President Hamid Karzai said security would be handed from Nato to Afghan control in a second wave of transition.

Mohammad Marjan, police chief of Nad-e Ali, confirmed the attack.

“On the way back from training, their vehicle struck a roadside bomb. As a result 10 police were killed and one was wounded,” he said.

British forces have been operating in the district since 2006 and recently said the joint security effort had led to an 86 per cent drop in violence this year compared to 2010.

The ALP arms local people to protect their communities in areas where the Afghan army and regular police have limited reach.

It does not have law enforcement powers and is due to more-than triple in size to 30,000.

Critics have called it little more than a militia but Nato says the community force helps bolster security in rural areas.

There are around 130,000 international troops, mainly from the United States, in Afghanistan helping government forces combat the insurgency.

Helmand’s provincial capital Lashkar Gah has already been handed from Nato to Afghan control.

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Turkish air strikes kill 23 Kurds near Iraq: official

DIYARBAKIR: Turkish air strikes killed 23 Kurdish villagers in the southeast near the Iraqi border early Thursday, an official of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) said.

Provincial officials found 23 bodies at Ortasu village in Sirnak province, councillor Ertan Eris told pro-Kurdish Roj TV from the bombing site. Nineteen of those killed had so far been identified.

Eris said the dead were among a group of 35 to 40 people, their ages ranging from 16 to 20, who had crossed the border to smuggle goods.

Local security sources said the group was smuggling gas and sugar into Turkey from northern Iraq and may have been mistaken for Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebels.

The PKK, which took up arms in Kurdish-majority southeastern Turkey in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed about 45,000 lives, is labelled a terrorist organisation by Ankara and much of the international community.

Eris said the death toll was likely to rise further, with snow and rough terrain complicating the search for bodies. He had at first put the death toll at 11.

Local security officials confirmed the bombing but declined to give the number of casualties.

The pro-Kurdish Firat news agency said 35 villagers, including children, were killed in the strikes.

Clashes between Kurdish rebels and the army have escalated in recent months.

The Turkish military launched an operation in northern Iraq in October after a PKK attack killed 24 soldiers in the town of Cukurca near the Iraqi border, the army’s biggest loss since 1993.

PKK rebels usually launch attacks on Turkish targets from their rear bases in northern Iraq.

The army then killed 36 Kurdish rebels in Kazan Valley of Hakkari province, near the Iraqi border.

Media reports in Turkey and abroad, as well as the BDP, have accused Turkey of using chemical weapons against the rebels but the army has denied the allegations.

Iraqi officials and the BDP have also claimed Turkish military air strikes in August killed a family of seven in northern Iraq during an operation to bomb PKK hideouts.

Turkey denied the charges and summoned Iraq’s ambassador to the foreign ministry to convey its concerns over the claims. An anonymous Turkish diplomat called the allegations a “PKK game”.

In November Turkey bombed the Sulaimaniyah and Arbil provinces of Iraq’s autonomous northern Kurdish region, wounding one civilian, Kurdish official said.

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Police shoot seven ‘terrorists’ in China’s Muslim west

BEIJING: Police in China’s restive Central Asia border area fatally shot seven members of a Muslim ethnic group in what officials said Thursday was an attempt to end a kidnapping by terrorists, but what a rights group said was excessive force.

Accounts from officials and government websites said police officers opened fire after they encountered resistance in a Wednesday night raid on a mountain hideout outside Hotan city to free two men kidnapped by ”a violent terrorist group.”

Aside from the seven dead, four people were injured and another four arrested, and while police freed the two hostages, one officer was killed and another injured, said an account on the official website of Xinjiang, the region where the incident took place.

A spokeswoman for the Xinjiang government confirmed the account and identified the kidnappers and their hostages as Uighurs, the indigenous, mainly Muslim ethnic group.

”They were holding weapons, and they injured the local police,” said the spokeswoman, Hou Hanmin.

Long-simmering resentment among Uighurs over rule by China’s Han majority and influxes of Chinese migrants into Xinjiang has sporadically erupted into violence.

Separatist sentiment is rife, with some Uighurs advocating armed rebellion. A smaller fringe has been radicalized by militant calls for Muslim holy war and has been found in training camps across the border in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

China has responded to the sporadic violence by increasing the police presence, conducting raids and at times restricting the practice of Islam _ moves that have further alienated many Uighurs and ratcheted up tensions.

Wednesday’s raid in Hotan ”was an excuse for more suppression,” said Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the German-based World Uyghur Congress. Dilxat said that Uighurs in the area reached by phone gave unverified accounts of a higher death toll and told him that police were confiscating mobile phones to prevent calls, messages and photos from getting out.

”The Uighurs cannot get used to Chinese in their homeland,” said Dilxat.

Whenever conflict arises, he said, Chinese authorities resort to overwhelming force. ”This is the way it is,” he said. ”As soon as Uighurs resist, the Chinese police turn to violent methods.”

The Hotan area has been on the front lines of separatist clashes for more than a decade. In July, a group of Uighurs stormed a police station and took four hostages, killing four; police killed 14 Uighurs to end the takeover.

China initially blamed that attack on Uighur terrorists trained overseas, and though the government frequently makes that accusation whenever violence erupts in Xinjiang, it has seldom provided evidence to back up the claims of organized terrorism.

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Arab observers visit more Syrian protest hubs

DAMASCUS: Arab monitors headed to more Syrian protest hubs on Thursday after the flashpoint city of Homs as world powers warned Damascus not to hinder their mission to reveal the truth about the crackdown on dissent.

More bloodshed was reported as army defectors killed at least four soldiers in the southern province of Daraa, two civilians were shot dead in Homs’ Baba Amro quarter, another in Hama and one during protests in Aleppo province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday.

Also reported were arrests and gunshot wounds in Idlib province and more shooting injuries, with three suspected fatalities, in a village near Damascus.

Accusations that the regime was trying to hide the facts from the monitors were punctuated by France, which charged the team was not being allowed to see what was happening in Homs as repression continued.

Those concerns were highlighted when Baba Amro residents refused to allow observers in because they were accompanied by an army officer, the Observatory said. The standoff ended when the officer withdrew.

The residents asked the monitors to “come and see the wounded people and the parents of the martyrs, and not members of the (ruling) Baath party,” Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

The monitors also visited Homs’ Bab Sebaa quarter, where the Observatory said the regime had organised a parade in support of President Bashar al-Assad.

The observers were next due to visit Daraa, cradle of the nine-month anti-regime protests, the Northern provinces of Hama and Idlib and around Damascus.

The veteran Sudanese military intelligence officer said observers would also fan out 50-80 kilometres around Damascus.

The observers arrived in Syria at the weekend and on Tuesday visited Homs, which has been besieged by government forces for several months.

Dabi said the visit to Homs had been “good” and added more observers would join the mission, which now numbers 66 people.

French foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said Tuesday’s visit had been too brief and insufficiently revealing.“A few Arab League observers were able to be briefly present in Homs yesterday. Their presence did not prevent the continuing of the bloody crackdown in this city, where large demonstrations were violently repressed, leaving about 10 dead,” he said.

“The brevity of their visit did not allow them to understand the reality of the situation in Homs. The Arab League observers must be allowed to return without delay to this martyr city, to travel everywhere in it freely and to have the necessary contact with the public.”

Washington insisted that the monitors have unfettered access to members of the opposition.

“It was just day one; it was one small area of Homs,” State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner told reporters when asked to comment on Dabi, who revealed nothing negative after the first visit to Homs.

“We need to let this mission get up and running, let them do their job and then let them give their judgment.

“It’s important that they have access to all areas in order to carry out a full investigation,” he said.

It is also important for the monitors to observe “as many of the protests as possible, engage with as many members of the opposition as possible,” Toner said.

The mission is part of an Arab plan endorsed by Syria on November 2 that calls for the withdrawal of security forces from towns and residential districts, a halt to violence against civilians and the release of detainees.

Valero said “the international community will be reassured when the violence has stopped, when the army had returned to barracks, when the political prisoners are freed and when foreign journalists will receive visas to go to Syria.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov urged maximum freedom for the observer mission.

“We constantly work with the Syrian leadership calling on it to fully cooperate with observers from the Arab League and to create work conditions that are as comfortable and free as possible,” he said.

Syrian foreign ministry spokesman Jihad Makdisi has said the “mission has freedom of movement in line with the protocol” Syria signed with the Arab League.

However, the deal bans observers from sensitive military sites.

On Wednesday, Syria freed 755 prisoners who had been involved in anti-regime unrest but have “no blood on their hands,” state television said.

In November, authorities said they freed more than 4,300 detainees.

In other developments, Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh said the “killing in Syria must stop, and promised reforms must be implemented without delay.

“Doing this will prevent outside intervention, preserve Syria’s unity and stop the bloodshed,” he said.

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