GI Special 5K3: Volunteer Draft – November 5 , 2007
Thomas F. Barton
The war in Iraq is a war of words and manipulated emotions, said former Marine and anti-war crusader Liam Madden, during a speech given to the student body of Vermont Academy Friday. Madden, a Bellows Falls Union High School graduate, was a communications specialist who served in Iraq from September 2004 to February 2005. As an example of this war of words, he talked about companies such as Blackwater. “Don’t call them security contractors,” said Madden. “They are cowboys.” Their only reason for being in Iraq, he said “is to cause mayhem.” “They are the worst kind of mercenaries. They are not beholden to any laws. They’re not held accountable to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They’re not held accountable by U.S. law. And they are not held accountable by Iraqi law. The role they play is criminal.” Another way the perception of the war has been manipulated, he said, is how Americans have labeled those who have taken up arms against what he called the occupation of Iraq. “We never really say who is resisting in Iraq,” he said. Though there are plenty of labels — the enemy, terrorists, al-Qaida, foreign fighters and insurgents — the truth is “Iraqi people are in the resistance,” he said….

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Tuesday, 6 November 2007
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
In a dispatch posted at 11:17am Baghdad time Tuesday morning, the Yaqen News Agency reported that a source in the Human Rights Office in ad-Diwaniyah, 180km south of Baghdad, announced that seven women had been raped and the jails and prisons in ad-Diwaniyah and one male prisoner had been tortured to death. Yaqen reported the source, who asked not to be identified, as saying that major violatios of human rights have taken place and still take place in the prisons in ad-Diwaniyah, in particular in the Directorate of Crimes and in the Directorate of Prisons and Deportation. The worst cases being rape and the death of one prisoner under torture….

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What the upcoming Israeli/Palestinian peace summit should entail
Dutch, USA – Axis of Logic
Today Israel occupies over 78% of the Palestinian peoples’ historic homeland of Palestine instead of its 55% UN share in 1948 and is responsible for almost wiping them and Palestine off the map by uprooting hundeds of thousands of innocent Palestinians from their homes and some 500 villages to make way for incoming settlers and condemn them to a wretched life in over crowded refugees for the last 60 years by refusing to allow them to return in accor- dance with UN Resolution 194. Yet Israeli officials have the audacity to allow strangers from foreign continents to return to Israel and offers them generous incentives to live in the Palestinian territories. Lands they have illegally occupied since the 1967 war under international law….

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LEBANON: Iraqi refugees face prison and deportation
IRIN News
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) puts the number of Iraqi refugees in Lebanon at 50,000 people, of whom only 8,476 are registered. Another 500 are being held in prison, it says, merely for violating immigration rules. “This is a question of human rights,” said UNHCR regional representative Stéphane Jaquemet. Having not signed the UN’s Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, introduced in 1951, Lebanon does not grant asylum to refugees, despite the presence on its territory of more than 400,000 Palestinians. The overwhelming majority of Iraqi refugees and asylum seekers – 95 percent according to UNHCR figures – are smuggled into Lebanon across the porous border with Syria. Once inside, such Iraqis have no legal status, and lacking protection under international law, are subject to detention and deportation….

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Don’t Sign for Apartheid in Palestine
International Solidarity Movement
The French group “Two Peoples, Two States” calls the public for signing a petition (based on a “Two States Solution”, on the outlines of the Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abbed Rabbo’s “Geneva Initiative”, and the Ami Ayalon and Sari Nusseibeh’s “The Peoples Voice”), which “acknowledge the equal legitimacy of both liberation struggle movements”, and which, in a suspicious way, fails to call for Israel’s full compliance with its obligations under international law through ending its illegal military occupation, its denial of Palestinian refugee rights, and its system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens…

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The Last “Enemy Combatant” on the U.S. Mainland
The Torture of Ali al-Marri
ANDY WORTHINGTON
Torture is defined in many ways. To the US administration, nothing that it ever does is torture. In keeping with the notorious “Torture Memo” of August 2002, drafted primarily by Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief counsel David Addington, “enhanced interrogation techniques” (as the administration euphemistically defines its forays into torture) only actually become torture if the suffering produced is equivalent to organ failure or even death…

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When Israel Was Apartheid’s Open Ally
Lenni Brenner, thepeoplesvoice.org
Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, has opened up much of the American public to serious discussion of Israel’s realities. He’s no experton Zionist history, but the Anti-Defamation League and other pro-Israel propagandists must now work 25 hours a day, 366 days a year, trying to discredit equating Israel and apartheid South Africa. Curiously, Carter only mentions South African apartheid 3 times. He relates how, on his 1973 visit to Israel,”General Rabin described the close relationship that Israel had with South Africa in the diamond trade (he had returned from there a day or two early to greet us) but commented that the South African system of apartheid could not long survive.”….

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Annals of Journalism: A Worthy Innovation From the NY Times
Chris Floyd
A Taliban spokesman has denied the accusation that the group was behind the horrific suicide bombing in northern Afghanistan yesterday. In reporting on the attack, the New York Times twice made careful mention of the fact that the spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, “has been unreliable” and “often made erroneous claims” in the past (…) we recommend that this rigorous but fair journalistic standard be applied across the board. Why not try it the next time an Administration official or a White House spokesperson – or indeed, a White House resident – makes a public statement? For instance: “General David Petraeus, whose claims of progress in Iraq have often proved erroneous in the past, said today that the new security measures in Baghdad are bringing a sense of stability to the city, etc. etc….

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Ba’ath Party statement about Istanbul Conference
Roads to Iraq
Arab Ba’ath Party statement about Istanbul Conference and the threats on Iraq’s northern borders …The ethnic and sectarian ambitions of the two Kurdish parties are behind escalation of the PKK activities on the Kurdish borders….. ….The conference shows the fragility of Maliki’s government, and his readiness to be used as a tool by the Americans to gain some support that prevent the crash and the fall under the strikes of Iraqi resistance heroes…….

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Palestinian in Hebron Severely Beaten by Fanatic & Uncontrolled Illegal Israeli Settlers
Hiyam Noir, PalestineFreeVoice
Since the start of the Al Aqsa Intifada, the world media outlets have published the crimes inflicted every day and night by Israel against the Palestinian people, living in occupied Palestine..The Willful killing of Palestinian civilians by armed Israeli State terrrorists and by Israeli illegal paramilitary settlers. These grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention mandate universal prosecution for their perpetrators, whether they are military or civilian,as well as the right to prosecute their commanders, military or civilian, including the political leaders of Israel….

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PA calls for release of two female patients
Palestinian Information Center
The ministry of prisoners and ex-prisoners affairs in the PA caretaker government has demanded the release of two Palestinian women who were detained by the IOF at the Erez crossing almost six months ago. The ministry in a press release on Tuesday said that Rawda Habib, 30, was on her way to undergo a surgery in the Palestinian lands occupied in 1948 in the company of her aunt Fatma Al-Zak, 39, who was in her second month of pregnancy, but were arrested at Erez at the pretext of planning a human bombing attack! The statement noted that both were immediately taken to interrogation despite their health conditions, which resulted in further deterioration of their conditions. The minister of prisoners and ex-prisoners, Dr. Basem Naim, held the IOF fully responsible for any harm done to those two women….

He appealed to legal and international institutions to step in and save the lives of female prisoners in Israeli occupation jails.

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Saudi Minister confirms building a wall along Iraq borders
KUNA
Saudi Interior Minister, Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz, has confirmed the Kingdom’s plan to build a security wall along the borders with Iraq. The Saudi Ministry received 14 applications from local and international firms to build the iron curtain-style security wall, Prince Naif said in statements Sunday night noting that the offers were being studied….

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Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood: Al-Qaeda is an American-made organization
Roads to Iraq
…Q: Why the Brotherhood do not call Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, to stop violent acts that distort the image of Islam, and to review their approach to the service of Islam and Muslims? A: We do not issue calls to anyone; Because we believe that the “Bin Laden”, the entire Al-Qaeda, is American-made from the start till the end, and there is nothing called Al Qaeda, the Americans have goals (implementing them) under the threats of Al Qaeda, “bin Laden”, which are all false….

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The Rape of 7 female detainees in the New Iraqi Democracy
Aliraq.news
On Monday, a responsible from the Office of Human Rights in Diwaniyah stated that 7 female detainees were raped in the prisons and detention centers of Diwaniyah whilst under torture. The responsible who spoke on condition of anonymity affirmed that huge human rights violations are taking place the Diwaniyah prisons and in particular in the Anti Crime Bureau., the Directorate of Prisons, and the Deportation Bureau. He said that arrested women are systematically raped and that one of them died under torture. He added that these women are raped and tortured in the most hideous of ways by the Police force. There are confirmed reports that at least 7 of these women awaiting interrogation/investigations have been raped and one woman has died from torture….

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“Hang ‘Em High” – The new frontier of the left?
Gabriele Zamparini, The Cat’s Dream
That desert of corpses drowning under an ocean of blood, also known as the New Iraq, must have an aphrodisiac effect capable of stimulating the most hidden passions. Already with the lynching of the last president of Iraq almost a year ago, that raunchy desire surfaced from the darkest side of humankind in the form of a sinister caw in the air. When the silence strategy failed because of the spontaneous outcry following the horror of a couple of videos showing the barbaric lynching of Saddam Hussein, the Western circus of mountebanks, human rights crooks, think tanks, maître à penser (including many “on the left” and in what is known as “the anti-war movement”), were forced to give the most sophisticated explanations and with their sapience helped the already propagandized Western public opinion to buy one more crime and accept this other moral and legal monstrosity (…) Now, with more than 1.2 millions Iraqi killed, more than 5 million Iraqi refugees, cholera, death squads, depleted uranium, ethnic cleansing and a country completely annihilated, that aphrodisiac effect seems to have poisoned our blood completely if one can read on one of the best alternative websites on the left the call for hanging three more Ba’ath party officials: Ali Hassan al-Majid, Sultan Hashem al-Tai and Hussein Rashid al-Tikriti. Has “Hang ‘Em High” become the new frontier of the left?…

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The agonizing truth about CIA renditions
The fate of prisoners secreted away under the Bush administration is in some ways worse than even Hollywood has portrayed.
Stephen Grey, Salon
At 3:44 p.m. on Jan. 24, 2004, a luxury Boeing 737 business jet operated by the Central Intelligence Agency landed at Kabul Airport in Afghanistan. Onboard were its flight crew, eight members of a CIA rendition team and a blindfolded prisoner who was shackled by his wrists and feet. The behavior of the prisoner, a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri, concerned the CIA team leader onboard. According to an agency insider, the leader sent word to Washington that “there was something strange about el-Masri. He didn’t behave like the others they’d captured. He was asking: Is he the right guy?” Within days it emerged that el-Masri was indeed the wrong man. It was a “100 percent case of mistaken identity,” said another former agency official. Yet, despite this discovery, el-Masri spent 18 weeks in solitary confinement in a CIA “black site,” or secret prison used by the United States in its war on terror. He is still waiting for an apology or an explanation….

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Iraqis fleeing homes in droves: Red Crescent
Herve Bar Mon
Iraqis are fleeing their homes in droves and the number of displaced within the war-torn country has reached almost 2.3 million, most of them women and children, the Iraqi Red Crescent said. The organisation’s latest report, obtained by AFP on Monday, said 368,479 people had left their homes to escape sectarian violence in September alone. This brings the total number of internally displaced Iraqis to 2,299,425 since the US-led invasion in 2003, it said, adding that most of these urgently need basic care. At least another two million Iraqis have fled abroad — mainly to neighbouring countries, according to UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) figures published in August….

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Punishing Gaza
Stephen Lendman
On September 20, Haaretz reported: “The security cabinet voted unanimously yesterday to increase sanctions against the Hamas-run Gaza Strip (and declare) the region a ‘hostile entity.’ “ A further statement read: “We will reduce the amount of megawattage we provide to the Strip, and Hamas will have to decide whether to provide electricity to hospitals or weapons lathes.” Israeli officials also decided to punish Gazans by restricting: — fuel as well as electricity from Israel to Gaza; — the passage of goods and people through border crossings that are already severely restricted; and — visits to prisoners even further than how limited they are already. An increased monitoring of funds was also announced as well as stating border crossings would be closed for up to 48 hours in response to (crude small homemade) Qassam rocket fire, and that Israel would supply nothing further to Gaza residents “except for (whatever Israel considers) humanitarian needs.” Hamas’ response was swift and sharp….

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Israeli stabs Palestinian to death just because he is an Arab
Palestinian Information Center
An Israeli man stabbed and killed a Palestinian taxi driver in Kiryat Yam, north of Haifa, on Monday then admitted that he committed the crime just because the victim was an Arab. Arab media in the 1948 occupied lands reported that Emad Khouri, 41, who works as a taxi driver, went to a public park for a short rest when the culprit came from behind and stabbed him. The media sources said that Khouri managed to walk for almost 20 meters before he collapsed and fell in the street; paramedics could not save his life…

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Tuesday: 8 GIs, 35 Iraqis Killed; 15 Iraqis Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
Although violence was light for Iraqi civilians, eight U.S. servicemembers were killed in separate incidents. At least 35 Iraqis were killed and 15 more wounded in the latest violence, which included an attack on policemen in Mosul and a pair of assassinations of local politicians. Military authorities reported that four U.S. soldiers were killed during an explosion that occurred as they were conducting combat operations yesterday in At Ta’mim province. In Anbar province, another soldier was killed in combat. A sailor was killed during an explosion in Salah ad Din province. Another soldier died from a non-combat related incident in Taji, and one soldier died in Kuwait from an illness….

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40 ~~ 60 ~~ ACTUALLY 90 YEARS OF OPPRESSION FOR PALESTINE
Desert Peace
This month marks the 90th anniversary of the signing of the Balfour Declaration… the official beginning of the occupation of Palestine. The sun might have set on the British Empire but millions are still suffering from their occupation , including the Palestinians. Below is a Special Report from the Palestine Chronicle about this infamous Declaration. How long will it be before Palestine sees a Declaration of Independence? The time is long overdo…..

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Tuesday, 6 November 2007
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
In a dispatch posted at 11:17am Baghdad time Tuesday morning, the Yaqen News Agency reported that a source in the Human Rights Office in ad-Diwaniyah, 180km south of Baghdad, announced that seven women had been raped and the jails and prisons in ad-Diwaniyah and one male prisoner had been tortured to death. Yaqen reported the source, who asked not to be identified, as saying that major violatios of human rights have taken place and still take place in the prisons in ad-Diwaniyah, in particular in the Directorate of Crimes and in the Directorate of Prisons and Deportation. The worst cases being rape and the death of one prisoner under torture….

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Hamas urges Abbas to stop “futile” negotiations with Israel
Palestinian Information Center
Hamas Movement has urged PA chief Mahmoud Abbas to immediately halt the “futile” negotiations with the Israeli occupation government to protest the IOF troops’ kidnapping of a Palestinian lawmaker and a national figure in the West Bank. “We urge the PA presidency to take clear stand towards the Israeli occupation practices and to stop the PA-Israeli negotiations in show of protest to that kidnapping”, the Islamic Movement stressed in a statement it issued Tuesday, and a copy of which was obtained by the PIC….

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Surge reported in number of internally displaced Iraqis
Azzaman
The number of Iraqis kicked out of their homes has surged 16 percent in October despite claims by the government that it has declined. The Red Crescent, Iraq’s Red Cross equivalent, said at least 100,000 more Iraqis were forced to leave their homes in October. “The number of internally displaced people in the country has surged to 2.3 million from 2.2 million,” said Amal al-Karbouli, Red Crescent’s deputy head….

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Al-Najaf Governor Calls Federalism Best Solution For Iraq
RadioFreeEurop
The governor of the Iraqi province of Al-Najaf says that federalism offers the best solution for Iraq’s regions to reconstruct and succeed economically. As’ad Sultan Abu Gulal said on a visit to RFE/RL in Prague today that his region is using the decentralization of power in Baghdad to make many of its own decisions. He says the result it that Al-Najaf has achieved economic self-sufficiency, both in food and fuel….

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Closure of crossings traps students in Gaza
Rory McCarthy, Guardian
Khaled al-Mudallal expected to spend this autumn sitting in lectures and writing papers for his final year in business and management studies in Bradford, the town he has lived in for six years. But when Mr Mudallal, 22, went home to visit his wife and family in Gaza this summer he found himself trapped. Within a few days of his return Hamas, the Islamist movement which won Palestinian elections last year, seized control of the Gaza Strip. Israel closed the crossings out of Gaza and six weeks ago declared the small stretch of land a “hostile entity”…

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Bush’s Turkey shoot
Pepe Escobar
… “Iraq” is actually no more; it’s been smashed into three virtually independent statelets – exactly what Israel wanted in the first place. Israel is so keen on an independent Iraqi Kurdistan because this is the way towards a new Kirkuk-Haifa oil pipeline (the old one was shut down in 1948) – which will pass though three American bases and cross US-friendly Jordan. A complicating factor is that at the same time Tel Aviv avidly coddles racist, Kurd-hating Turkish generals…

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Report: 44 assassinated in October
Ameen Abu Warda – IMEMC News
The International and Public Relations department of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) on Monday issued a report claiming that 44 Palestinians had been deliberately assassinated by the Israeli army during the month of October. The report claims that 44 Palestinians were deliberately targeted and killed, 27 of them by Israeli army air strikes, and a further 120 injured. The report also details the abduction of at least 350 Palestinian civilians, the destruction of at least 3 homes, the damaging of 445 Dunums of Palestinian-owned land, and the confiscation of over 1130 Dunums for Illegal Israeli settlements….

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Turkish PM says N.Iraq offensive planned
Selcuk Gokoluk and Evren Mesci, Reuters
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has said that a military operation is still planned against Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq, but diplomats suggested any action would now be limited in scope. Erdogan held crucial talks with U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday to push Washington to crack down on some 3,000 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels based in northern Iraq from where they carry out attacks in Turkey. Bush said after their talks at the White House that he was committed to countering the militants, which he called their “common enemy” and offered to share intelligence with Turkey, a NATO ally….

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U.S. military says to release 9 Iranians held in Iraq
Reuters
The U.S. military said on Tuesday it would soon release nine Iranians being held in Iraq, including two who were among five detained in northern Iraq on suspicion of providing support to Shi’ite militias. The detention of the five Iranians in northern Arbil in January this year contributed to a significant rise in tensions between Iran and Iraq, as well as between bitter rivals Tehran and Washington. “It is our intent to release nine Iranians currently in custody in the near future,” U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith told a news conference. “Two of them were detained in Arbil in January of this year,” he said….

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Monday, 5 November 2007
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
In a dispatch posted at 11:45pm Baghdad time Monday night, the Yaqen News Agency reported that a bomb exploded by a joint patrol of puppet army and policemen in the az-Za’faraniyah neighborhood of southern Baghdad. Yaqen reported a source in the puppet police as claiming that the blast killed two passers by and wounded seven more. The same puppet police source also said that armed men shot and killed a puppet regime employee in the al-Ghudayr neighborhood of eastern Baghdad. The source added that armed men also shot and killed Hamad ‘Abd al-Latif, a member of the puppet Municipal Council in the al-Khadra’ neighborhood of western Baghdad….

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Abbas’s policemen clash with Fatah gunmen in Nablus
From Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank
Undisciplined and poorly-trained Palestinian Authority policemen on Monday clashed with Fatah gunmen at the Balata refugee camp near Nablus. At least nine people, mostly civilians, were injured, two of them seriously. Earlier, as many as 300 policemen were deployed in Nablus, the most lawless city in the West Bank, in an effort to reestablish law and order and prove to the Americans that the Ramallah-based regime was capable of assuming “security responsibilities” in the West Bank. The deployment of the policemen was fully coordinated with the Israeli occupation army…

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Amazing Grace
Charles Sullivan
It seems inexplicable that so many of the American people can be so dazed and confused, while moral degenerates ransack our nation, piss and defecate upon the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and brazenly loot the public domain, making a mockery of the rule of law and societal norms; whatever they may be. We have been programmed to believe that we are the greatest nation to ever emerge from the mists of history, that everything about us as a people is exceptional and exemplary. Despite a history of endless provocation and war and countless other forms of self mutilation, we claim that we are a peace loving people—god’s own children, animated by divine stirrings….

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Suicide bomber ‘kills 90 including 5 Afghan MPs’
Mark Tran, Guardian
A suicide bomber killed 90 people and wounded 50 in an attack on a group of MPs visiting the northern Afghan town of Baghlan, Afghan officials said today. “The bodies of 90 people have been brought to the hospital so far, and 50 people have been wounded,” the director of Baghlan hospital told Reuters. Provincial officials said five MPs, including the opposition spokesman Mostafa Kazimi, were among those killed. Mr Kazimi, a former Afghan commerce minister, was a powerful member of the Northern Alliance, which overthrew the Taliban with US and British backing at the end of 2001. Baghlan’s intelligence chief, Abdurrahman Sayedkhail, said the number of casualties was so high it was impossible to give an accurate number at the moment….

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