Photo: A Dutch soldier passes a baby to the child's mother as soldiers search a house in a village in Baluchi pass in Uruzgan province November 1, 2007. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic (AFGHANISTAN)

Security Incidents on November 3, 2007

A 21-year old Dutch soldier was killed by a bomb in southern Afghanistan and two others were wounded in the incident, the Dutch military said. The soldiers were on a patrol in the province of Uruzgan when an improvised device exploded. The wounded are in stable condition, the military said.

One Coalition and one Afghan National Army servicemember were killed around 5:30 p.m. today while conducting combat operations in northwest Uruzgan Province.

A Canadian soldier was wounded in an explosion Friday as he patrolled a district north of Kandahar City, where heavy fighting has been seen in recent days.

Suspected Taliban militants killed a women they accused of spying for the Afghan government and foreign troops in Ghazni province.

Two Afghans found beheaded in Rashidan district of Ghazni province. They were abducted several days ago.

Security Incidents on November 4, 2007

At least 25 Taliban reported killed Saturday in Afghanistan. This happened in Uruzgan province. "The bodies of the dead were left at the battlefield," it said, adding that a Taliban commander was seriously hurt.

A roadside bomb blast killed four Afghan police in Ghazni provinced. Two more were wounded in this attack.

Thanks whisker for many of the links above.

REPORTS

How to Help Afghanistan people

NEWSMAKER-Judges, militants bring out authoritarian in Musharraf

Until this year the greatest threat President Pervez Musharraf faced was from al Qaeda assassins who have tried at least three times to kill him. Having overthrown Sharif and co-opted the rump of his party, there was no way Musharraf was going to allow his return, and when Sharif tried to make a comeback in September he was sent back to Saudi Arabia, where he is still is. Bhutto, however, had engaged Musharraf in negotiations, and as the general's stock fell, her own leverage increased, to the point where he granted her protection from prosecution in old corruption cases to allow her to come back last month. The suicide attack that greeted Bhutto in Karachi, killing 139 supporters and members of her security team, shocked the country and the world. But members of Musharraf's own intelligence agencies have for months privately voiced fears the country is in danger of becoming like Iraq. Internal security has deteriorated markedly since July, when commandos stormed Islamabad's Red Mosque to crush a Taliban-style movement that sought to impose Islamic Sharia law. The same month, a much-criticised ceasefire with militants in Waziristan, a tribal region regarded as a hotbed of al Qaeda and Taliban support, broke down, unleashing a storm of violence. More than 800 people have been killed in militant-related violence in the last four months, half of them by suicide attackers that have largely targeted security forces. A proclamation on Saturday cited both the militant threat and troublesome judges to justify invoking emergency powers and suspending the constitution.

Death rate for Afghan kids drops

Six years after the Taliban's ouster, medical care in Afghanistan has improved such that nearly 90,000 children who would have died before age 5 in 2001 will survive this year, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Sunday. Saddled for years with one of the world's worst records on child health, Afghanistan has seen access to health care rise dramatically since the U.S.-led invasion. Thousands of health clinics have been built across the country, and the Afghan government and aid agencies have trained tens of thousands of doctors, vaccinators and health volunteers who now reach into some of the country's most remote areas. Access to health care for Afghans has jumped from 8 percent of the population in the 1990s to close to 85 percent today, thanks in large part to efforts by USAID, the World Bank and the European Commission. The under-5 child mortality rate in Afghanistan has declined from an estimated 257 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2001 to about 191 per 1,000 in 2006, a 25-percent drop, the Ministry of Public Health said, relying on a new study from Johns Hopkins University. "This is certainly very positive news," said the U.N. spokesman in Afghanistan, Adrian Edwards. "To come from such low life expectancy to see this improvement does appear to be an indication that the work on the health sector here is beginning to pay off." President Hamid Karzai, surrounded by smiling Afghan children at a news conference in Kabul, thanked aid organizations and health workers for their work. He said 89,000 children will be saved each year because of the improved health care.

85 percent Afghans have access to health service, says health minister

Afghanistan's Minister for Public Health Syed Mohammad Amin Fatimi said Sunday that 85 percent of the country's population have access to health services. "Thank God that today 85 percent of the people of our country have access to health services while during Taliban regime it was unbelievable," Fatimi told journalists at a function held to thank the doctors and health servicemen. He added that the rate of child mortality in the post-Taliban nation has declined from an estimated 257 per 1,000 live births in 2001 to 191 per 1,000 in 2006. "The achievement in the health sector saves the lives of 89,000 infants and children under five each year compared to the rate during Taliban rule," the health minister said. However, Fatimi added that still Afghanistan is in need of continued international support to overcome problems in health sector. "It is a long way to go to provide access to basic health services for Afghans in remote areas," he stressed, adding " Continuing progress will be difficult without a firm commitment by the international community to increase and secure financing for the sector."

Armed northern militias complicate Afghan security

Much of the world's attention on Afghanistan is now focused on the country’s Pashtun-dominated south and east, where Taliban fighters are battling NATO troops and U.S.-led coalition forces. But there is a different kind of tension in northern Afghanistan. Illegal ethnic-Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara militias in the north appear to be using the threat of a resurgent Taliban as an excuse to hoard weapons and more forcefully protect their interests, such as ruling over land they have controlled since the Taliban’s collapse or defending drug export routes that are a major source of income. Experts say the entrenchment of the militias, who once fought together against the Taliban, reflects divisions and mistrust among regional commanders of different ethnicities which -- if left unchecked -- could exacerbate tensions in the country at a time when its security situation is already on a razor’s edge. "Obviously, what is happening in the north is really the growing Balkanization of the country," said Sam Zia-Zarifi, a spokesman for Human Rights Watch and field researcher in Afghanistan who has monitored programs by the United Nations and Afghan government to disarm the militias. "It's been an ongoing trend in Afghanistan for warlords who are ostensibly allied with the government to entrench themselves even more fully," Zia-Zarifi told RFE/RL. "A lot of them are now swollen with the narcotics trade -- profits from the sale of poppy and heroin. They have a lot of political clout because many of them have allies in the parliament, if they are not directly members of the parliament. And the next step is to openly flex their military muscle.”

Reconstruction: Enhancing Kabul’s sanitation needs

According to a 2004 World Health Organization report, over 2.6 billion people still lack access to basic sanitation, such as toilet facilities. That is roughly 40 percent of the world’s population. When Kabul’s population exploded, going from 1 million to a whopping 4.5 million over the last five years, the virtually nonexistent sewer system and inefficient ‘dry-pit’ latrine facilities used by Kabulis created a looming public health crisis. The central government turned to a regional sanitation juggernaut, Sulabh International, whose nearly forty-year commitment to global sanitation improvement has revolutionized the way developing nation’s process and discard human excrement. The Indian government funded the sanitation improvement program by giving nearly $1 million dollars (32.7 million Indian Rupees) for construction materials and labor costs. Following a successful public awareness campaign by Sulabh employees, a joint Indian-Afghan construction team went to work in July of 2006. The Sulabh toilets rely on an advanced twin-pit system that avoids the need for potentially leaky septic systems. Human excrement is refined by a biogas digester and converted into a usable fuel known as biogas, mostly a methane and carbon dioxide mixture. In fact, the toilet complexes can run their own lighting and heat stoves by using such biogas. The remaining liquid part that exits the biogas plant is rendered harmless after going through the Sulabh Effluent Treatment Technology (SET) treatment. The byproduct becomes colorless, odorless and pathogen free so it can then be used for agriculture/horticulture uses without any health risk.

AFGHANISTAN: Displaced families in Farah need urgent help

Hundreds if not thousands of recently displaced people in southwest Afghanistan are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance and protection, displaced families and provincial aid workers told IRIN on 4 November. Due to insecurity, there are no reliable figures on the exact number of people who have abandoned their in the Gulistan and Bakwa districts of Farah Province and sought temporary refuge in other parts of the isolated province. However, Aleem Siddique, a spokesman for the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan UNAMA), said “about 500 families might have been displaced” as a result of fighting. Afghan officials, including President Hamid Karzai, have acknowledged that Taliban insurgents have overrun at least two districts in Farah Province. Immediately after Afghan government forces lost control of Gulistan District on 2 November, insurgents reportedly executed several civilians accusing them of being government spies, the Afghanistan Interior Ministry (MoI) and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a joint statement on Sunday. “This is an intolerable outrage designed to terrorise the local population,” read the MoI-ISAF press release.