(AP) Taliban militants are beheading and burning their way through Pakistan’s picturesque Swat Valley, and residents say the insurgents now control most of the mountainous region far from the lawless tribal areas where jihadists thrive.
The deteriorating situation in the former tourist haven comes despite an army offensive that began in 2007 and an attempted peace deal. It is especially worrisome to Pakistani officials because the valley lies outside the areas where al Qaeda and Taliban militants have traditionally operated and where the military is staging a separate offensive.
“You can’t …

KABUL, Afghanistan: A suicide car bomber plowed his Toyota into rush-hour traffic on a commercial boulevard in Kabul on Thursday morning, killing at least four civilians and wounding up to 17 , the police and hospital authorities said.
The bomber was apparently targeting a passing convoy of NATO troops, the Interior Ministry said in a statement, but several witnesses said there were no security forces, either Afghan or foreign, in the immediate vicinity of the blast.
The explosion occurred about 150 yards from a major traffic circle and a heavily-guarded entrance to …

http://www.war-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/rifleman-rai.jpg

KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) — A Taliban spokesman said Monday that Afghan President Hamid Karzai did not have the authority to make a peace offering to its reclusive leader, Mullah Omar.
Karzai said over the weekend he would “go to any lengths” to provide protection to Mullah Omar if the militant leader agrees to enter peace talks.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousif told CNN that Karzai’s offer is meaningless because he has to rely on the British and the Americans to provide his own security.

Mullah Omar, the elusive leader of the anti-government Taliban, appears to have rejected an offer from Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, of protection in exchange for peace talks.
A Taliban spokesman rejected on Monday the offer of safe passage and reiterated that foreign troops had to leave before negotiations could start.
“As long as foreign occupiers remain in Afghanistan, we aren’t ready for talks because they hold the power and talks won’t bear fruit,” Mullah Brother, the purported deputy leader of the Taliban, told the Reuters news agency by satellite telephone from …

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan and Istanbul –A suicide car bomber struck an American military convoy today as it was passing through a busy open-air livestock market, killing at least 20 Afghan passers-by, together with a U.S. soldier, authorities said.
The attack outside the eastern city of Jalalabad, which also left scores of market patrons and other bystanders injured, pointed up one of the conflict’s grimmest ongoing patterns: civilians being caught up almost daily in insurgent attacks aimed at foreign troops.

KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) — A Canadian Broadcasting Corp. correspondent who had been held in Afghanistan for four weeks has been released, the CBC said Saturday.
Mellissa Fung “is now safe and in reasonable health,” Hubert T. Lacroix, CBC/Radio Canada’s president and chief executive officer, said in Toronto.

KAANDAHAR, Afghanistan: A U.S. coalition airstrike and clashes with the Taliban militants in southern Afghanistan earlier this week killed 37 civilians and 26 insurgents, according to an Afghan government report released Friday.
The report also accused the Taliban militants of seeking shelter near a wedding party in the Kandahar province’s Shah Wali Kot district shortly after ambushing a coalition patrol on Monday, according to the findings compiled by the governor of Kandahar province.

The Taliban is a Sunni Islamist, predominately Pashtun movement that ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, when its leaders were removed from power by Northern Alliance and NATO forces. Following this it regrouped and since 2004 it has made a strong revival as an insurgency movement fighting a protracted guerrilla war against the current government of Afghanistan, allied NATO forces participating in Operation Enduring Freedom, and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). No longer operating only in Afghanistan, it is based in the Frontier Tribal Areas …

A Taliban suicide bomber attacked Afghanistan’s Information Ministry building in Kabul, killing five people and wounding more than 20. Ayaz Gul reports for VOA from Islamabad.
Witnesses are reported as saying that at least three militants stormed the ministry building in the center of the Afghan capital. One of them, they say, blew himself up while his companions opened fire on security guards before entering the building.