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| Afghanistan |
| Taliban claim murder of senior Karzai adviser |
| 2011-07-19 |
[Dawn] The Taliban on Monday claimed the overnight killing of one of Afghanistan's Caped President Hamid Maybe I'll join the TalibanKarzai's ... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a Pashtunface on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use... key advisers, who died along with a politician in an attack on his home in Kabul. Jan Mohammad Khan, the former governor of southern Uruzgan province and a key ally of the embattled president, was killed along with an MP for Uruzgan. "We killed Jan Mohammad Khan. We made him pay for his deeds," Taliban's front man, Zabihullah Mujahed, told AFP by telephone from "We dunnit and we're glad! Glad, I tells yez!" Khan, a long-standing Karzai ally and key tribal chieftain, was killed in the attack that the interior ministry said was carried out by two assailants. The gunnies targeted the house late Sunday and a standoff lasted until the early hours of Monday. One police officer and the two assailants were also killed, the interior ministry said. The liquidation comes less than a week after the president's half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai was rubbed out by a close friend at his home in the southern province of Kandahar, in an attack also claimed by the Taliban. A senior government official speaking anonymously told AFP that Khan's death was a major blow for the US-backed leader. "He was very close to the president. His death is as important as Ahmad Wali Karzai's death," the official said. Just hours before Sunday's attack, a ceremony was held in central Bamyan province marking the start of the transition of security duties from NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the style of the American pants... forces to Afghans, a process aimed at leaving the country free of foreign troops by 2014. Sunday was also the last day in Afghanistan for top US commander General David Petraeus. Experts say Khan had a reputation for brutality and double-dealing with tribal rivals, falsely accusing some of being Taliban, and Dutch forces taking over Uruzgan operations in 2006 insisted on his removal as governor. According to the independent website afghan-bios.info, Khan's nephew runs a 3,000-strong militia in Uruzgan that he had inherited from his uncle. Khan beat feet a previous liquidation attempt on August 4 when a cycle of violence bomb went kaboom!by his convoy in the southern province. |
| Posted by:Fred |