[KhaamaPress] At least two people were killed in an attack by unknown button men in the city of Herat ...a venerable old Persian-speaking city in western Afghanistan, populated mostly by Tadjiks, which is why it's not as blood-soaked as areas controlled by Pashtuns... on Monday morning local officials told media.
Herat governor, Waheed Qatali said that unidentified button men opened fire on an NDS vehicle belonging to the department’s provincial deputy head in the Sayed Mukhtar area in the Northern part of the city.
A driver and a security guard were murdered according to the officials, the occurred when the NDS official was not in his vehicle.
The vehicle and some weapons were stolen by the unknown men, reports indicated.
Local officials not commented on the incident and no group or individual so far grabbed credit for the murders.
This comes as a large drug production factory of the Taliban ...the Pashtun equivalent of men... was destroyed by the Afghan forces in Nangarhar The unfortunate Afghan province located adjacent to Mohmand, Kurram, and Khyber Agencies. The capital is Jalalabad. The province was the fief of Younus Khalis after the Soviets departed and one of his sons is the current provincial Taliban commander. Nangarhar is Haqqani country.. province.
According to Defense Ministry’s statement on Sunday, the Afghan national security and defense forces conducted a clearance operation in the region.
ANDSF implemented the operation in the Toto village of Shirzad district, Taliban were pushed back and the village was cleared of their existence, the statement said.
The statement added at least 150 Taliban fighters were killed, and 120 IEDs were discovered and defused during the operation.
Defense forces during the raid destroyed as many as 1000 sacks of Hashish.
So far Taliban has not commented on the government’s operation in Nangarhar province.
[Breitbart] Alternative for Germany (AfD) candidate Stephan Schwarz was hospitalised after a brutal attack by Antifa militants in the town of Schorndorf over the weekend while campaigning for this year’s regional election.
Schwarz, along with several other AfD activists, manned an information booth in the centre of the town on Saturday when they were approached by a group of around 15 to 20 people carrying hard-left Antifa flags and banners, the city prosecutor said.
The extremists dragged 36-year-old Stephan Schwarz to the ground and beat him while he was down. As he attempted to call the police, one of the attackers stole his phone, newspaper Rems Zeitung reports.
After the police arrived on the scene, Schwarz was taken to a local hospital where he was diagnosed with a concussion. The AfD information booth was also destroyed in the attack.
Police later arrested five people in connection with the incident, three outside the town’s railway station and two others on a pedestrian footbridge. All five are said to be between the ages of 18 and 25 and are currently under investigation by the Stuttgart public prosecutor’s office.
Schorndorf mayor Matthias Klopfer condemned the attack stating, “Violence must never be a means of political debate: I am dismayed and appalled by the violent attack on the AfD candidate for the Landtag, Stephan Schwarz, and the destruction of the AfD’s information stand at today’s Schorndorf weekly market.”
The attack is just the latest on an AfD politician by far-left Antifa militants in recent years and comes two years after the brutal attack on MP Frank Magnitz, an attack that was described by some as an attempted assassination.
Antifa militants later took credit for the attack on the far-left web platform Indymedia, stating, “The anti-fascist spring Bremen announces that we wanted to free the AfD politician F. Magnitz of his fascist ideas on Monday at 18.00 clock local time.”
Last year, German security authorities sounded the alarm over growing levels of violence within Antifa circles, with a report claiming that members may be plotting attacks and assassinations on law enforcement officials and political opponents.
Police in Eugene, Ore. have made the 24th arrest in regards to the ongoing investigation into the mass BLM-antifa rioting & looting that occurred in May 2020. Travis Francis Lopez Hart, 40, was arrested & charged earlier this month. #AntifaRiots#antifahttps://t.co/5gT8XlNCskpic.twitter.com/cHjygOaUUG
[AnNahar] A young man was rubbed out on Monday during a protest in the capital of Iraq's southern Dhi Qar province over poor public services, a local medical source told AFP.
Dozens of demonstrators had gathered in front of the governorate to demand the dismissal of governor Nazem al-Waeli over a deterioration in public services, an AFP correspondent in the picturesque provincial capital of Nasiriyah said.
They set tires alight and threw stones at the administrative building, before security forces arrived and used both tear gas and live fire to break up the demonstration.
"A demonstrator who was under 20 years old was rubbed out," the medical source in Nasiriyah told AFP, saying another four protesters and 12 security forces were maimed.
Dhi Qar authorities announced a strict curfew in all major cities across the province to prevent further rallies.
Decades of war, government graft and slim investments have left Iraq's water, electricity and other public works thoroughly lacking.
Many households have only a few hours of state-provided electricity per day or complain of polluted tap water, and the resulting anger has erupted into protests in the past.
In late 2019, public frustration over poor services, unemployment and corruption morphed into an unprecedented anti-government movement across southern Iraq as well as the capital Baghdad.
Nearly 600 people have been killed in protest-related violence since then, including in mass violence at demonstrations but also in targeted liquidations of activists.
Among them are more than a dozen security forces.
In January, a policeman was rubbed out and dozens more people maimed during a rally in Nasiriyah, which has long been a hotspot of protests.
The attack is the third in a week to target Western diplomatic, military or commercial installations across Iraq after months of relative calm.
At least two rockets hit within the perimeter of the Green Zone, where the American and other foreign embassies are based, according to a statement by Iraq's security services.
A security source told AFP at least one rocket hit the headquarters of Iraq's National Security Service near the US diplomatic mission.
Others crashed into nearby residential districts, including a multi-storey parking complex in the neighbourhood of Harithiya, a witness told AFP.
The attack comes one week after more than a dozen rockets targeted a military complex at the Arbil airport in northern Iraq, which hosts foreign troops from a US-led coalition helping Iraq fight jihadists since 2014. Two people were killed, including one foreign contractor based at the airport, who died immediately, and a civilian, who died of his wounds on Monday.
On Saturday, another wave of rockets hit the al-Balad airbase north of Baghdad, where Iraq keeps most of the F-16s it has purchased from the US in recent years. Security sources said at least one local contractor for Sallyport, the US company that maintains the planes, was maimed.
[IsraelTimes] Israeli security forces arrested two Paleostinians suspected of carrying out an attempted shooting and successful car-ramming in the northern West Bank last month, the military says ahead of their indictment.
On January 9, the two men drove their car to a military checkpoint near the Paleostinian village of Yabed armed with a loaded Carlo-style makeshift submachine gun. As they approached, the gun fell out of the car, so no shots were fired, but as they sped away, the driver rammed the vehicle into one of the soldiers at the checkpoint, lightly injuring him.
A manhunt was launched to track down the two suspects, and a gag order was placed on the case, barring outlets from publishing further details about it.
That has been lifted today, as the Israel Defense Forces reveals that the two suspects were arrested in a joint operation with the Shin Bet security service and Border Police days after the attack in the nearby Paleostinian village of Qabatiya.
The military also releases helmet cam footage of the arrest, showing members of the elite counterterrorism Duvdevan unit raiding the village late at night and arresting one of the suspects from his bed.
The pair is due to be indicted in a military court later this month, the IDF says.
[RT] Terrorists in Syria’s northeastern province of Idlib are preparing to carry out a false-flag operation against civilians that they will then blame on Damascus, the Russian Reconciliation Center has said.
Citing intelligence reports, Rear Admiral Vyacheslav Sytnik, deputy chief of the Russian de-escalation mission in Syria, claimed that militants belonging to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have transported containers with toxic agents to the settlement of Tarmanin. The Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists plan to use the chemicals, believed to be chlorine, to "simulate" an attack resulting in casualties among local residents, Sytnik said. He added that the militants hope to then blame the incident on Syrian government forces.
The warning comes several weeks after the reconciliation center revealed that it had been tipped off that HTS militants and members of the ’White Helmets,’ a self-styled civil defense group, were planning to stage a chemical attack in a town 11 kilometers (seven miles) northwest of Aleppo.
The Syrian government has been blamed for a number of alleged chemical attacks that have occurred since war broke out in the country in 2011. In some cases, western militaries have used the alleged atrocities to launch retaliatory strikes against Syrian military targets.
While Washington and other nations have pointed to videos made by the White Helmets as proof of the attacks, Russia and Syria have produced witness testimony, as well as other evidence challenging the West’s narrative.
The US and its allies launched missile strikes against Syria in response to an incident in 2017 in Khan Shaykhun. Syria was targeted by US missiles again in April 2018, following an alleged chemical attack in Douma. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which investigated the Douma incident, has also come under scrutiny, after whistleblowers accused the UN chemical weapons watchdog of sanitizing its report on the matter and of ignoring analyses made by the group’s fact-finding team.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...the Pashtun equivalent of men...
