The campaign officially opened for Afghanistan's first post-Taliban parliamentary race Aug. 17, even as violence continues to plague the country. Authorities are still not ruling out the possibility of an attack against a helicopter that crashed near Herat Aug. 17, killing 17 Spanish soldiers on board, although bad weather could have been the cause. (RFE/RL, Aug. 17) But Taliban rebels were almost certainly behind the bombing of a bus carrying police trainees that day in Kandahar, killing one and injuring at least 11. Eyewitnesses said the bomb was in a cart placed near a speed bump on a road in the city centre and was detonated as the bus passed by. (BBC, Aug. 17)

A Taliban spokesman called Hakimi said guerillas destroyed a US military vehicle Aug. 9 in Ghazni Province. "The Americans suffered loss of life in the attack," Hakimi said. US military sources acknowledged that a vehicle was destroyed by an improvised explosive device in Ghani, injuring two servicemen. Meanwhile in northern Faryab Province, leaflets have been distributed warning female candidates against running in the September parliamentary elections, the Mazar-i-Sharif daily Sahar reported.

Bad news for Nuristan, the remote and isolated region of Afghanistan's central mountains, known until just over a century ago as Kafiristan (land of the infidels) because of the survival of the ancient Indo-European nature religion there. The region straddles the border with Pakistan, and on the Pakistani side the name Kafiristan, and the ancient "pagan" religion, still survive. Its isolation has kept it out of the war which has wracked Afghanistan for the last generation—but perhaps not for long. The anti-terrorist Jamestown Foundation website claims that the recent US anti-Taliban offensive (which resulted in the loss of a Chinook helicopter and several US soldiers), dubbed Operation Red Wing, has forced Osama bin Laden to take refuge in Nuristan:

Claims of civilians wiped out in US air raids, journalists detained by security forces, GIs missing in combat. My, things just look better and better in Afghanistan. Thanks to Lebanon's Daily Star for this report which, while compiled from wire services, is more comprehensive and realistic than most of what we're getting in the US press.

US helicopters and hundreds of troops are searching for soldiers who went missing in Afghanistan just before a helicopter coming to their aid was shot down in Kunar province June 28, killing the 16 on board, all Navy Seals and Army Special Forces. Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi boasted that insurgents killed seven US "spies" before the Chinook was downed, and that one survivor of the crash is being held. "He was trying to escape up the mountain when our mujahedeen caught him," he said.

A suicide bomber crashed his car into a US military patrol just outside Kandahar June 13, killing himself and wounding four US soldiers, one seriously. The US ambassador in Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, condemned such attacks as "cowardly acts of desperation, committed by criminals who move in shadows and hide in holes" and vowed to catch those responsible. (IHT, June 14)

Just four days after the last one, another mosque was hit by a suicide bomber in Pakistan last night. This time the blast, at a Shi'ite mosque in Karachi, killed five and wounded 18. It also sparked a night of violence in which Shi'ites set fire to a KFC outlet, killing six workers trapped inside. A hospital was also ransacked, and a gas station and several vehicles torched, leaving another five dead. Police said intelligence agents suspect the blast was the work of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a banned Sunni militant group with ties to al-Qaeda. More than 100 Pakistanis have been killed in a cycle of attacks between Sunnis and Shi'ites in the past year alone. (Reuters, May 31)

Violence against women and girls in Afghanistan is pervasive, says Amnesty International today, releasing its latest report "Afghanistan: Women Under Attack."

"Throughout the country, few women are exempt from violence or safe from the threat of it," the report finds. Afghan women remain at daily risk of abduction and rape by armed men, forced marriage and being traded in settlement of disputes and debts. They face discrimination from all segments of society as well as by state officials. Violence against women is widely accepted by the community and inadequately addressed at the highest levels of the government and the judiciary. Investigations by the authorities into complaints of violent attacks, rape, murders or suicide of women are neither routine nor systematic, and few result in prosecutions.